Aesthetics and Logic in Baumgarten’s Philosophy

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten is regarded as the founder of modern philosophical aesthetics in history of philosophy. Baumgarten associates aesthetics with sensible knowledge and its perfection where beauty appears as the perfection of sensible knowledge. In this context Baumgarten, as a representative of rationalist tradition, takes as a problem that sensible knowledge being accepted as intuition or lower knowledge. According to him, things are known through superior faculties as the object of logical knowledge, while sensible things are known through inferior faculties as the object of science of sensible or aesthetics. Baumgarten’s point of view makes us face a duality in regard to cognitive faculties and ways of knowing: logic and aesthetics. In this work, the aim is to clarify how Baumgarten positions aesthetics and logic in his philosophy