Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
German philosopher
born July 17, 1714, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]
died May 26, 1762, Frankfurt an der Oder
Main
German philosopher and educator who coined the term
aesthetics and established this discipline as a distinct
field of philosophical inquiry.
As a student at Halle, Baumgarten was strongly influenced
by the works of G.W. Leibniz and by Christian Wolff, a
professor and systematic philosopher. He was appointed
extraordinary professor at Halle in 1737 and advanced to
ordinary professor at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1740.
Baumgarten’s most significant work, written in Latin, was
Aesthetica, 2 vol. (1750–58). The problems of aesthetics had
been treated by others before Baumgarten, but he both
advanced the discussion of such topics as art and beauty and
set the discipline off from the rest of philosophy. His
student G.F. Meier (1718–77), however, assisted him to such
an extent that credit for certain contributions is difficult
to assess. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who used Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica (1739) as a text for lecturing, borrowed
Baumgarten’s term aesthetics but applied it to the entire
field of sensory experience. Only later was the term
restricted to the discussion of beauty and of the nature of
the fine arts.
In Baumgarten’s theory, with its characteristic emphasis
on the importance of feeling, much attention was
concentrated on the creative act. For him it was necessary
to modify the traditional claim that “art imitates nature”
by asserting that artists must deliberately alter nature by
adding elements of feeling to perceived reality. In this
way, the creative process of the world is mirrored in their
own activity.
Baumgarten wrote Ethica Philosophica (1740; “Philosophic
Ethic”), Acroasis Logica (1761; “Discourse on Logic”), Jus
Naturae (1763; “Natural Law”), Philosophia Generalis (1770;
“General Philosophy”), and Praelectiones Theologicae (1773;
“Lectures on Theology”). His brother, Siegmund Jakob
Baumgarten, was an influential Wolffian theologian.
