Foreign thinker
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
Alexander Gottlieb BaumgartenAestheticsGerman
Life and Thought
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was an 18th-century German philosopher and the founder of aesthetics as an independent discipline within philosophy. By defining aesthetics as the "science of sensory cognition," he distinguished this field from logic and metaphysics, exerting a significant influence on Kant and subsequent philosophy.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was born on July 17, 1714, in Berlin. He was raised in a religious family under the influence of the Pietist tradition and studied philosophy and theology at the University of Halle. Baumgarten was influenced by Leibniz and Christian Wolff, and in 1735, he earned his master's degree with the dissertation Philosophical Meditations on Some Matters Concerning Poetry. In this work, he introduced the term "aesthetics" (Aesthetica) for the first time, meaning the science of sensory cognition.
He began teaching at Halle in 1737 and, in 1740, became a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, where he remained for the rest of his life. His most important work is Aesthetica in two volumes (1750–1758), in which he defines aesthetics as the science of the perfection of sensory cognition and distinguishes it from logic (the science of rational cognition). Baumgarten also wrote works on metaphysics, ethics, and logic, including Metaphysica (1739), which was later used by Kant in his teaching.
Baumgarten died on May 26, 1762, in Frankfurt an der Oder. By establishing aesthetics as an independent discipline, he paved the way for subsequent developments in the philosophy of art and German aesthetics, including in the work of Kant and Hegel.
