In his Metaphysics, § 451, Baumgarten defined taste, in its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect, based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure. The discipline in its modern form is primarily concerned with issues surrounding the creation, interpretation, and ultimate appreciation of works of art, and so it involves how the experience of such material is mediated through the individual sensitivity of the beholder, and the way the experience of it is shaped through presentation by cultural conventions such as the exhibition and review. Nowadays, aesthetics is universally perceived as the branch of philosophy that deals with art, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “taste, or of the perception of the beautiful”. The philosopher merely appropriated the word aesthetics, which had always meant sensation in ancient Greek, adding to its significance the meaning of “taste” or “sense” of beauty, the usage currently employed in modern times. He called this epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes, §CXVI, pp. He famously introduced the current definition of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics in his Halle master’s thesis when he was only twenty-one years of age. In addition, Nannini demonstrates that Baumgarten held that aestheticians should not limit themselves to studying the sensuous basis of experiments but should also conduct experiments in order to achieve the highest goal of aesthetics, that is, beauty.On the 26 th of May 1762, German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was born in Frankfurt (Oder), Brandenburg. In this sense, it is argued, Baumgarten’s aesthetics aims to provide the various types of experimentalism, ranging from natural science to theology, with a unified epistemological framework. Against this backdrop, Nannini explores how Baumgarten integrates the new conception of experience into his project of aesthetics as the science of sensible knowledge, making a case for the importance of aesthetics in both the theorization and the practical training of experience.
With particular reference to early eighteenth-century philosophy (Buddeus, Syrbius, Wolff, Hanov, and Hagen), Nannini examines the new sensuous concept of experience, emphasizing its background in both the natural sciences and experimental theology. In this chapter, Alessandro Nannini deals with the relationship between the concept of experience and the birth of modern aesthetics as a discipline by focusing on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762).
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