Baumgarten developed aesthetics to mean the study of good and bad " taste," thus good and bad art, linking good taste with beauty.īy trying to develop an idea of good and bad taste, he also in turn generated philosophical debate around this new meaning of aesthetics. With the development of art as a commercial enterprise linked to the rise of a " nouveau riche" class across Europe, the purchasing of art inevitably lead to the question, 'what is good art'. Previously the word had merely meant 'sensibility' or 'responsiveness to stimulation of the senses' in its use by ancient writers. Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven sons of the pietist pastor of the garrison, Jacob Baumgarten and his wife Rosina Elisabeth.Both his parents died early and he was taught by Martin Georg Christgau where he learned Hebrew and got interested in Latin Poetry.Whilst words may change their meaning through cultural developments anyway, Baumgarten's reappraisal of aesthetics is often seen as the key moment in the development of aesthetic philosophy. He is concerned with aesthetics as a science.School_tradition = Enlightenment philosophyĪlexander Gottlieb Baumgarten ( J– May 26, 1762) was a German philosopher. Here he is dealing with aesthetics connected not so much with the sphere of art, but rather with the very fundaments of human perception and knowing. Baumgarten asserts (and he does so precisely in these pre-aesthetic writings) that sensory knowledge is analogical with the principles of rational knowledge. On the basis of a defining of the group of so-called lower epistemic powers of the soul (where, in addition to sense, there is for example to be found the poetic ability, or imagination) aesthetics arises. Baumgarten's starting point is that ideas are the result of the epistemic power of our soul, and they are therefore crucial in any understanding of the character of knowledge in general. Baumgarten's theory of aesthetics is founded on Leibniz's system of the monads, which are distinguished by the different clarity of their ideas. The periods prior to the publication of Aesthetica are covered by four texts in which the author discovers and defines the basic thoughts of "the new science of aesthetics". We are not concerned here so much with his key, though fragmentary, work Aesthetica, rather we seek to map the writings that led up to that work and which formed it. This article is the result of the author's inquiry into the work of the eighteenth century German philosopher and aestheticist Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.
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