(b Berlin, 17 June 1714; d Frankfurt an der Oder, 26 May 1762). German philosopher. The founder of aesthetics as a subdiscipline of philosophy, he was the son of a military chaplain in Berlin who had been assistant to the Pietist theologian and pedagogue A.H. Francke. He studied first at the Grauen Kloster school in Berlin, but in 1722 was sent to Francke’s well-known school for orphans in Halle. In 1730 he entered Halle University as a student of theology and philosophy, but during this period he frequently went to Jena to attend lectures by the celebrated rationalist philosopher J.C. Wolff, who later, together with Leibniz, became the major influences on Baumgarten’s own philosophical theories. In 1735 he received a master’s degree with his first major work, the thesis Meditationes philosophicae. In 1737 he was appointed professor of philosophy and theology at the university of Frankfurt an der Oder. His several Latin works on metaphysics, ethics and practical philosophy widely influenced the teaching of these disciplines in German universities. Kant thought him one of the greatest philosophers of his time.
Baumgarten’s most important contributions were the result of a systematic study of what he was the first to call aesthetics, a subject he introduced into the university curriculum as a branch of philosophy. In his usage, aesthetics treated only in part the problems of beauty. Rather, he created aesthetics as an aspect of empirical psychology concerned with the inferior faculty, that is the faculty of sensible knowledge. For him aesthetics together with logic (superior faculty) constituted a science he labelled ‘gnoseology’, or a theory of knowledge. He was most concerned with poetic aesthetics; and despite his purpose to give all the arts a place in a total scientific scheme of philosophy, he made little application of his new ideas to music and the other fine arts. However, his student and biographer Georg F. Meier developed these relationships in his Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (1757); this work influenced the growth of music aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century, for example in the philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn and J.G. Sulzer.
Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Halle, 1735/R; Eng. trans., 1954, as Reflections on Poetry)
Metaphysica (Halle, 1739)
Ethica philosophica (Halle, 1740, 3/1763/R)
Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750–58/R)
Initia philosophiae practicae primae acroamatice (Halle, 1760)
Acroasis logica, aucta et in systema redacta a Joanne Gottlieb Toellnero (Halle, 1761)
Jus naturae (Halle, 1763)
ed. J.C. Förster: Sciagraphia encyclopaediae philosophicae (Halle, 1769)
ed. J.C. Förster: Philosophia generalis (Halle, 1770/R)
A. Riemann: Die Ästhetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens (Halle, 1928)
W. Serauky: Die musikalische Nachahmungsästhetik im Zeitraum von 1700 bis 1850 (Münster, 1929/R)
H.G. Peters: Die Ästhetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens und ihre Beziehungen zum Ethischen (Berlin, 1934)
H.J. Kaiser: ‘Musikvermittlung als Vermittlung sinnlicher Erkenntnis’, Musikpädagogische Forschung, ii (1981), 210–32
GEORGE J. BUELOW