From Rhetorics to Aesthetics. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s „Aesthetica”

Piotr Kozak
Uniwersytet Warszawski

The heuristic premise in the paper holds that Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s project of aesthetics was not only an expansion of former theories of poetry and taste, but it was also an original attempt of creating a science of sensitive cognition (scientia cognitionis sensitivae). Baumgarten’s starting point was a rhetoric tradition, which he adopts, extends and reformulates. This paper addresses the relation between the original idea of aesthetics and classical rhetoric. In order to investigate the unique contribution of aesthetics to rhetoric and vice versa, I explore Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae De Nonnullis Ad Poema Pertinentibus and Aesthetica.