Teoría de la sensibilidad, teoría de las humanidadesel proyecto filosófico de la Estética de A. G. Baumgarten

Abstract

This work deals with the origin and conception of A. Baumgarten's Aesthetics as a philosophical project within the historical context of German culture in the first half of the eighteenth century. To this end, we present, on the one hand, Aesthetics as the common response to the epistemological needs posed at the time by two different traditions: the philosophical-rationalist demand for a "theory of sensibility", parallel to the "logic of understanding" and the rhetorical-poetic need for a "logic of ingenious thought" or for a "philosophical poetics", as an alternative to the scientific-mathematical gnosiology of modern rationalist discourse. On the other hand, against the backdrop of this double historical-cultural root, we analyse the two fundamental conceptions of aesthetics: as the gnosiology of sensibility and as a "general theory of the liberal arts" or humanities, and we suggest some of the problems and limitations linked to both and to the complexity of Baumgarten's idea of philosophical science.