Aesthetica by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

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Manuscripts submitted for inclusion in this special issue must be original work and should not be under consideration with any other journal. This revival attests the significance of Baumgarten’s legacy to the current expansion of the aesthetic field, three centuries after his effort to delimitate the concept and propose it as a new discipline with philosophical legitimacy.Ĭontributions concerning any aspect of Baumgarten’s work, theoretical predecessors or influence in modern and contemporary philosophy are welcome. In the last years, however, Baumgarten’s perspective has been revived not only by contemporary trends in aesthetics, such as neuroaesthetics, somaesthetics or everyday aesthetics, but also by new approaches within other philosophical branches, such as metaphysics, gnoseology or phenomenology. Fearing an elusive and subjective approach that could menace its philosophical status, analytic aesthetics refused to endorse the idea of an academic discipline concerned with sensory perception and experience. The idea of aesthetics as the science of sensory cognition proposed by Baumgarten in 1735 was almost immediately relegated to the status of curiosity and has been neglected by a tradition focused in the philosophy of art, which considered Hegel as its mentor. For scholars of Kant, the German Enlightenment and the history of metaphysics, Alexander Baumgarten's Metaphysics is an essential, authoritative resource to a significant philosophical text.On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Philosophica will devote a special issue to his philosophical thought. Together with a historical and philosophical introduction, extensive glossaries and notes, the text is supported by translations of Kant's elucidations and notes, Eberhard's insertions in the 1783 German edition and texts from the writings of Meier and Wolff. Available for the first time in English, this critical translation draws from the original seven Latin editions and Georg Friedrich Meier's 18th-century German translation.

Kant composed many of the preparatory sketches for the Critique of Pure Reason in the blank interleaved pages of his personal copy. Originally published in Latin, Kant used the Metaphysics for nearly four decades as the basis for lectures on metaphysics, anthropology and religion. Yet his manual on metaphysics was one of the chief textbooks of philosophical instruction in latter 18th-Century Germany. Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), an influential German philosopher preceding Immanuel Kant, is remembered mainly as a founder of modern aesthetics.

Aesthetica by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten