Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

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Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (born July 17, 1714 in Berlin , † May 27, 1762 in Frankfurt (Oder) ) was a German philosopher who stood in the tradition of Leibniz-Wolff's Enlightenment philosophy and established aesthetics as a philosophical discipline.

Life

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the son of the garrison preacher Jakob Baumgarten (born August 30, 1668 in Wolmirstedt; † July 1, 1722 in Berlin) and Rosina Elisabeth Baumgarten, née Wiedemann (born February 10, 1690 in Berlin; † May 23, 1717 in Berlin). One of the godfather was Alexander Hermann von Wartensleben . Baumgarten was the fifth of seven children, but only four of them had reached the first year of life. His oldest brother was the theologian Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten . Baumgarten spent his high school days at the Gray Monastery School in Berlin with Martin Georg Christgau (1697–1776). After losing his parents at an early age, he attended the seminar in Halle , led by August Hermann Francke in the spirit of Pietism , and studied theology , philosophy and “beautiful sciences” ( rhetoric and poetics ) at the University of Halle . He also attended lectures by the rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff in Jena . After completing his master's degree, he worked as a lecturer in poetics and logic at the orphanage he attended himself. With his dissertation, the Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735), he established aesthetics in Germany as an independent philosophical discipline - as a parallel discipline ("sister art") to logic.

In aesthetics, a form of cognitive world access should be shown that is able to convey reliable knowledge analogous to the achievements of reason. Such a mode of cognition (analogon rationis) , which is analogous to rational cognition, should come about through the lower cognitive faculties (senses), which had previously played a shadowy existence in epistemology . The central point is that the senses are assigned their own judgment : the taste . Poetry and with it poetics were thus given an appreciation: they became a means of conveying knowledge in a sensual (sensitive) way.

In 1737 he became a private lecturer in philosophy ("world wisdom") at the University of Halle . It was probably during this year that he contracted consumption , which contributed to his untimely death. In 1740 he became "Professor of World Wisdom and Fine Sciences" at the Brandenburg University of Frankfurt , the forerunner of the European University Viadrina . In 1743 and 1752 Baumgarten was elected its rector. His book Metaphysica was published in 1739. In 1740 his book Ethica philosophica was published. The first volume of his large-scale Aesthetica, of which only two volumes were completed, appeared in 1750 . In 1758 the second volume of this work appeared. The Acroasis logica (1761) finally appeared a year before his death . Immanuel Kant , who held Baumgarten in high regard, used his Metaphysica in the 1757 edition and his Initia philosophiae practicae primae in the 1760 edition as the basis for his own lectures on metaphysics and practical philosophy.

His work Philosophia generalis was published posthumously in 1770 .

family

Baumgarten married on April 18, 1741 in the Petrikirche (Berlin-Cölln) Luisa Wilhelmina Alemann (born January 17, 1720 in Berlin; † June 8, 1745 in Frankfurt (Oder)), daughter of Johann Philipp Alemann, Councilor in Berlin, and Juliana Elisabeth Zimmermann. The marriage remained childless.

On October 22, 1748 married Baumgarten in the Marienkirche in Frankfurt (Oder) Justina Elisabeth Albinus (* 1730, † March 31, 1764 in Frankfurt (Oder) (in or drowned)), daughter of Johann Jacob Albinus, chief official in Bischofsee (today : Stare Biskupice, Słubice ) and Christina Louisa Engel. He had four children with Justina Elisabeth: Eleonora Wilhelmina Baumgarten (born October 1, 1749 in Frankfurt (Oder); † September 3, 1750 in Frankfurt (Oder)), Eleonora Juliana Baumgarten (born June 6, 1751 in Frankfurt (Oder); † after 1763), Carl Gottlieb Baumgarten (born March 11, 1759 in Frankfurt (Oder); † after 1763) and Gottlieb Wilhelm Baumgarten (born August 28, 1762 in Frankfurt (Oder); † September 5, 1762 in Frankfurt (Oder) ). The city judge Winterfeld received the guardianship of the children.

reception

Baumgarten's thoughts, written in Latin , were first made known in Germany primarily through his student Georg Friedrich Meier .

Baumgarten's writings on aesthetic justification represent a turn in philosophical epistemology towards sensuality; sensuality was valued as a medium of knowledge.

Baumgarten's conception of aesthetics practiced a. a. had a great influence on Johann Gottfried Herder . His ideal of the “felix aestheticus”, the human being with all-round talent for sensual knowledge and natural play, was not only important for the cult of genius of the 18th century, but also for Friedrich Schiller's influential work On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters . In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant dealt with the concept of taste in Baumgarten's Aesthetica , which is based on the idea of ​​perfection in sensual knowledge .

Works

Aesthetica .

Original editions

  • Dissertatio chorographica, Notiones superi et inferi, indeque adscensus et descensus, in chorographiis sacris occurentes, evolvens. 1735.
  • Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. 1735 - §§ I-XI .
  • De ordine in audiendis philosophicis per triennium academicum quaedam praefatus acroases proximae aestati destinatas indicit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. 1738
  • Metaphysica (1739) ( facsimiles ).
  • Ethica philosophica. 1740.
  • Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten opens Some Thoughts on Reasonable Approval at Academies and invites you to his inaugural speech [...]. 1740.
  • Serenissimo potentissimo principi Friderico, Regi Borussorum marchioni brandenburgico SRJ archicamerario et electori, caetera, clementissimo dominio felicia regni felicis auspicia, a d. III. Non. Quinct. 1740.1740 .
  • Philosophical letters from Aletheophilus. 1741.
  • Scriptis, quae moderator conflictus academici disputavit, praefatus rationes acroasium suarum Viadrinarum reddit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. 1743.
  • Metaphysica Alexandri Gottlieb Baumgarten , 1757 , e-book from the Vienna University Library
  • Full text of the Metaphysica (3rd edition 1757) and the Initia Philosophiae Practicae (1760) in the electronic edition of the collected works of Immanuel Kant (so-called Bonn Kant corpus , University of Duisburg-Essen)
  • Aesthetica (1750–1758)
  • Initia Philosophiae Practicae. Primae Acroamatice . 1760 ( facsimiles ).
  • Acroasis logica in Christianum LB de Wolff. 1761.
  • Ius naturae. Posthumous 1763.
  • Sciagraphia encyclopaedia philosophicae. Ed. Posthumously Johs. Christian Foerster 1769.
  • Philosophia generalis. Ed. Posthumously Johs. Christian Foerster 1770.
  • Alex. Gottl. Baumgartenii Praelectiones theologiae dogmaticae. Ed. Posthumously Salomon Semmler 1773.
  • Metaphysica. Translated by Georg Friedrich Meier 1766, with a new ed. by Johann August Eberhard 1783.
  • Thoughts on the speeches of Jesus according to the content of the evangelical stories. Ed. Posthumously FG Scheltz & AB Thiele; 1796-1797.

Modern editions

  • Aesthetics. Latin-German. Translated, with an introduction, notes and registers edited by Dagmar Mirbach. 2 volumes. Meiner, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-7873-1772-1 , ISBN 978-3-7873-1773-8 (paperback 2009, ISBN 978-3-7873-1899-5 ).
  • Texts on the foundation of aesthetics. Latin-German (= Philosophical Library. Volume 351). Translated and edited by Hans Rudolf Schweizer. Meiner, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-7873-0573-4 .
  • Theoretical aesthetics. Latin-German (= Philosophical Library. Volume 355). Translated and edited by Hans Rudolf Schweizer. 2nd, revised edition. Meiner, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-7873-0785-0 .
  • The prefaces to metaphysics. Edited, translated and commented by Ursula Niggli. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-465-02877-5 (paperback 1999).
  • Metaphysica / metaphysics. Historical-critical edition. Latin-German. Translated, introduced and edited by Günter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl . Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-7728-2224-7 .

literature

  • Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: Sensual knowledge in the philosophy of rationalism (= Enlightenment. Volume 20). Edited by Alexander Aichele and Dagmar Mirbach. Meiner, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-7873-1921-3 .
  • Rüdiger Campus, Anselm Haverkamp , Christoph Menke (eds.): Baumgarten studies. On the genealogy of aesthetics . August Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-941360-38-9 .
  • Clemens Schwaiger: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten - An intellectual portrait (= research and materials for the German Enlightenment. II, 24). Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2011, ISBN 978-3-7728-2603-0 .
  • Nice thinking. AG Baumgarten in the field of tension between aesthetics, logic and ethics (= magazine for aesthetics and general art history, special issue 15). Edited by Andrea Allerkamp and Dagmar Mirbach. Meiner, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-7873-2816-1 .

Biographies

Web links

Wikisource: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten  - Sources and full texts (Latin)
Commons : Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ On July 17, 1714, according to Jan Lekschas' research on the line of the Baumgarten family. June 17, 1714 with Georg Friedrich Meier : Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben , p. 5, urn : nbn: de: bvb: 384-uba000080-0 , would therefore be a misprint.
  2. ↑ a b c Jan Lekschas: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In: jan.lekschas.de. Retrieved June 23, 2014 .
  3. ↑ May 26th is recorded in the death register of the Evangelical Church of St. Marien Frankfurt (Oder). After Georg Friedrich Meier: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben, p. 31, Baumgarten died "After midnight between May 26 and 27 [...] after 3 o'clock in the night"
  4. ↑ a b Georg Friedrich Meier: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben, p. 21
  5. ↑ Ursula Franke: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten . In: Julian Nida-Rümelin and Monika Betzler (eds.): Aesthetics and Art Philosophy. From antiquity to the present in individual representations . Krömer, Stuttgart 1998, pp. 72–79, here p. 78.
personal data
SURNAME Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1714
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1762
Place of death Frankfurt (Oder)