Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the forgotten philosophical and conceptual origins of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany. It offers fresh perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and will appeal to students and scholars who are interested in the history of aesthetics and the beginnings of the German aesthetic tradition.
Trade Review'Readers will learn much about Wolff and his school from Buchenau's engaging narrative and impeccable scholarship.' Journal of the History of Philosophy
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Wolff and the modern debate on a method of invention; 2. Wolff on the pleasure of invention; 3. Leibniz and Wolff on invention: hieroglyphs, images and poetry; 4. Poetry as revelation: Bodmer, Breitinger, Gottsched on the imitation of nature; 5. Invention, judgement, literary criticism; 6. The rhetorical shift: Baumgarten's founding of aesthetics in the Meditationes philosophicae; 7. Baumgarten's Aesthetica. Topics and the modern ars inveniendi; 8. Aesthetics and anthropology; 9. Aesthetics and ethics; 10. 'A general heuristic is impossible'. Kant and the Wolffian ars inveniendi; Conclusion.
