The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment

Stefanie Buchenau is a Maître de conférences in the German department of the Université Paris VIII.

• Introduction; 1. Wolff and the modern debate on a method of invention; 2. Wolff on the pleasure of invention; 3. Leibniz and Wolff on invention: hieroglyphs, images and poetry; 4. Poetry as revelation: Bodmer, Breitinger, Gottsched on the imitation of nature; 5. Invention, judgement, literary criticism; 6. The rhetorical shift: Baumgarten's founding of aesthetics in the Meditationes philosophicae; 7. Baumgarten's Aesthetica. Topics and the modern ars inveniendi; 8. Aesthetics and anthropology; 9. Aesthetics and ethics; 10. 'A general heuristic is impossible'. Kant and the Wolffian ars inveniendi; Conclusion.

'Readers will learn much about Wolff and his school from Buchenau's engaging narrative and impeccable scholarship.' Journal of the History of Philosophy