🧩 Philosophy 8h ago · Paul Guyer

18th Century German Aesthetics

SEP (Stanford Encyc.)
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[Revised entry by Paul Guyer on May 6, 2026.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master's thesis to mean episteme aisthetike, or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes sCXVI, pp. 86 - 7). But Baumgarten's denomination of the field was an adult baptism: without a name, aesthetics had been part of phil

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