This gives him room to add an emphasis on our enjoyment of the arousal of our emotions to Baumgarten’s emphasis on our enjoyment haumgarten the perfection of sensible cognition. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words. In the case of the visual arts of painting and sculpture, Wolff locates their perfection in imitation or veridical representation, while other arts find their perfections in the fulfillment of intended uses. It is in this sense that poetry can present more truth to us than either painting or music alone. In Herder’s view, these distinctions are artificial and the characterization of Baumgarten’s method in particular baumgarteh unfair. What is particularly striking is that he then uses what we might call this quantitative conception of the aim of poetry, that it baumgxrten more and denser rather than fewer and more clearly separated images, as the basis for an argument that poetry should be emotionally affecting.Īs we have seen, Wolff equates perfection, which is the object of pleasure in all contexts including those subsequently labeled aesthetic, with an objective sense of truth. The last paragraph of this is somewhat contorted: Thus far we have considered only Wolff’s most easthetica definition of perfection and therefore of beauty, namely that it is the coherence of a manifold insofar as we can perceive that through the sensation of pleasure. But he also emphasized that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically enjoyable and therefore valuable experience of the unhindered activity of the mind. In the midst of this controversy he died of a stroke in January,at aestthetica age of fifty-six. Winckelmann spent his two years in Halle -40 while Baumgarten was still teaching there and Meier was also a student. On the 26th of May, German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was born in Frankfurt (Oder), Brandenburg. Alexander Baumgarten was the first who used the word. The theory of aesthetics started controversies over its legitimate existence as a fully developed science. Aesthetica1 seems to be familiar in German. Although the content of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s. Revisiting Baumgarten's original idea of aesthetics will lead us to a more inclusive concept of that philosophical discipline.BAUMGARTEN’S AESTHETICA. I will argue, instead, that Baumgarten's importance and contemporary relevance lies in this: that his Aesthetica may serve as a profound contribution to the philosophy of the cultural sciences and humanities. The study of Baumgarten's foundational works on aesthetics should not be undertaken merely out of antiquarian interest. His core theme is the improvement ( perfectio) of human knowledge and cognition and the ways to reach this goal. In short, Baumgarten transcends the old opposition between rationalism and sensualism.
What he really attempts to present is an alternative philosophy of knowledge that goes beyond the purely rationalist, empiricist, and sensualist approaches. The making and understanding of artworks had served in his original programme only as an example for the application of his philosophy. Baumgarten did not primarily develop his aesthetics as a philosophy of art. In this paper, I will argue that today's aesthetics and the original programme developed by the German Enlightenment thinker Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the first half of the eighteenth century have only the name in common. Aesthetics is today widely seen as the philosophy of art and/or beauty, limited to artworks and their perception.