alexander gottlieb baumgarten aesthetics

Baumgarten made a great contribution to the development of philosophical terminology he made wide use of the terms “subjective” and “objective,” “in itself” and “for itself,” the introduction of which has often been mistakenly attributed to Kant. The consideration of aesthetic phenomena from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, which was first done by Baumgarten, had a special importance for the subsequent development of German classical aesthetics. 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.

He maintained that the perfection or beauty of a phenomenon lies in the harmonious agreement of three basic elements-content, order, and expression. He was the son of an assistant to the Pietist theologian. The latter at the same time seemed to Baumgarten to be a theory of the beautiful inasmuch as the sensory, indistinct perception of perfection was connected by him with pleasure in the beautiful. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the German Wolffian philosopher and aesthetician, was born in Berlin. In the field of gnoseology, following the German thinkers Leibniz and Wolff, he distinguished between higher (rational) knowledge-the subject of logic-and lower (sense-derived) knowledge, the theory of which Baumgarten was the first to call aesthetics. Originator of aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline.īaumgarten was a professor at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder.

German philosopher belonging to the school of C.

Born June 17, 1714, in Berlin died May 26, 1762, in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Alexander gottlieb baumgarten aesthetics