Baumgarten Alexander Gottlieb (1714–62), German philosopher. Born in Berlin, he was educated in Halle and taught at Halle (1738–40) and Frankfurt an der Oder (1740–62). Baumgarten was brought up in the Pietist circle of A. H. Francke but adopted the anti-Pietist rationalism of Wolff. He wrote textbooks in metaphysics (Metaphysica, 1739) and ethics (Ethica Philosophica, 1740; Initia Philosophiae Practicae Prima [‘First Elements of Practical Philosophy’], 1760) on which Kant lectured. For the most part, Baumgarten did not significantly depart from Wolff, although in metaphysics he was both further and yet closer to Leibniz than was Wolff: unlike Leibniz, he argued for real physical influx, but, unlike Wolff, he did not restrict preestablished harmony to the mind–body relationship alone, but (paradoxically) reextended it to include all relations of substances.
Baumgarten’s claim to fame, however, rests on his introduction of the discipline of aesthetics into German philosophy, and indeed on his introduction of the term ‘aesthetics’ as well. Wolff had explained pleasure as the response to the perception of perfection by means of the senses, in turn understood as clear but confused perception. Baumgarten subtly but significantly departed from Wolff by redefining our response to beauty as pleasure in the perfection of sensory perception, i.e., in the unique potential of sensory as opposed to merely conceptual representation. This concept was first introduced in his dissertation Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (‘Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry,’ 1735), which defined a poem as a ‘perfect sensate discourse,’ and then generalized in his twovolume (but still incomplete) Aesthetica (1750– 58). One might describe Baumgarten’s aesthetics as cognitivist but no longer rationalist: while in science or logic we must always prefer discursive clarity, in art we respond with pleasure to the maximally dense (or ‘confused’) intimation of ideas. Baumgarten’s theory had great influence on Lessing and Mendelssohn, on Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas, and even on the aesthetics of Hegel.
See also WOLFF. P.Gu.