Aesthetica by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

2 In the rationalist tradition within which Baumgarten's work is placed, truth concerns the higher cognitive faculty. 1 My claim is that the mind/body dualism dominating the rationalist tradition of modern philosophy is the principal obstacle preventing aesthetics from becoming an independent science of human sensibility. In this essay, I elaborate the results of the hypothesis that I submit in response to these questions. It was instead a theory of the cognitive value of human sensibility-a doctrine of 'sensible cognition.' A general historical and systematic question presents itself at this point: How shall human sensibility be conceived in order for aesthetics as a theory of sensibility to gain an independence of its own in philosophical discourse? And accordingly: How shall the human being be conceived in order for our aesthetic experience to claim a philosophical value of its own? At the moment of its inception, however, this discipline had little to do with art and was not primarily concerned with the beautiful. We owe to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) the introduction of 'aesthetics' into philosophical discourse.

If this was indeed Baumgarten's project, we might well ask to be excused from pursuing the subject further.While philosophers since antiquity have offered reflections and theories on subjects such as the beautiful, the sublime, art, and its appreciation, 'aesthetics' as a discipline in its own right dates back only to the second half of the eighteenth-century. Combining Kant's remark with Leibniz's view that beauty is-or, more precisely, flows from-perfection, we might conclude that Baumgarten simply lowered beauty from the level of distinct to that of confused concepts and tried to deduce its rules from the concept of perfection. In the Critique of Judgment, it is generally assumed to be Baumgarten Kant has in mind when, arguing that judgments of beauty are not cognitive or 'logical' judgments, he criticizes the view that beauty is perfection known confusedly or indistinctly. to bring the critical treatment of the beautiful under rational principles and so to raise its rules to the rank of a science'.

Explaining his own use of 'Transcendental Aesthetic' in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant criticizes Baumgarten's 'abortive attempt. Most of us are aware that it was Baumgarten who coined the name 'aesthetics' for the new philosophical discipline his Aesthetica was intended to establish but as for the content of that work, our acquaintance is likely to be indirect, through two remarks of Kant. ALTHOUGH the content of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica seems to be familiar in German philosophical circles, it is relatively unknown outside Germany.

Aesthetica by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten