1 - The Origins of Modern Aesthetics
1711–1735
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
It is well known that the subject of aesthetics, as a recognized and customary subject within the academic practice of philosophy, received its name in 1735. In that year, in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (“Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining to the poem”), the twenty-one-year-old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced the term to mean “a science of how things are to be known by means of the senses” (scientiam sensitive quid cognoscendi) (Meditations, §§cxv–cxvi). (Four years later, in his Metaphysica, Baumgarten would expand this definition to include the “logic of the lower cognitive faculty, the philosophy of the graces and the muses, lower gnoseology, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason”; and another decade later, in his monumental fragment Aesthetica, the first treatise to bear the title of the new subject, he would combine his two previous definitions to form his final definition of the subject: “Aesthetics (the theory of the liberal arts, lower gnoseology, the art of beautiful thinking, the art of the analogue of reason) is the science of sensitive cognition” (Metaphysica, §533; Aesthetica, §1). It is equally well known that although Baumgarten was the first to name the new subject and perhaps the first German philosophy professor to give it a regular place in his lectures and treatises, he by no means invented the subject itself.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Values of BeautyHistorical Essays in Aesthetics, pp. 3 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005