The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce the first program of the 2023 Virtual Summer Festival. The Institute for the Study of Aesthetics and Its History is presenting a talk by Prof. Colin McQuillan, “Aesthetics, Logic, and the Parts of Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany” (date/time: 10 May 2023 at noon EDT). 

Organizer: Robert R. Clewis, Director 

Host: Institute for the Study of Aesthetics and Its History 
(Philosophy, Gwynedd Mercy University, USA) 

Speaker: J. Colin McQuillan 

Paper Title (online): “Aesthetics, Logic, and the Parts of Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany” 

Date/time: 10 May 2023; 12 noon to 13:30 pm EDT 

Access: All are warmly invited. Please register using the Zoom link below.  

Registration required: 

https://gmercyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkf-6uqjMsGdF-nXv2NCX8RaQKodlX5tHw 

Abstract: The role aesthetics played in the division and classification of the parts of philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany was quite different than the role it plays in contemporary philosophy. When it was first introduced in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry, aesthetics was not primarily concerned with art, beauty, criticism, or taste; instead, it was supposed to guide the confused, sensible cognition of the lower cognitive faculty to perfection. In later works, Baumgarten situated his new science within metaphysics, as a part of empirical psychology, a counterpart to logic, and a necessary precondition for other sciences, like philosophical poetics and rhetoric. While Baumgarten’s conception of aesthetics and its place within philosophy was influential among some of his contemporaries, others took it upon themselves to redefine and reclassify aesthetics. Immanuel Kant, in particular, started to reconceive the relationship between aesthetics and logic in his lectures as early as the 1770s. Kant formalized his new understanding of aesthetics in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) when he identified “transcendental aesthetics” and “transcendental logic” as the two “elements” of his critique. However, he further complicated the role aesthetics played in philosophy in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where he distinguished aesthetic and cognitive judgments. The changing relationship between aesthetics and logic in eighteenth-century Germany provides a helpful example of the way philosophical systems are really articulated, appropriated, contested, and transformed, as well as the historical and contingent ways in which the parts of philosophy are distinguished and classified. 

Bio: J. Colin McQuillan is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, TX. He is the author of Early Modern Aesthetics (2015), the editor of Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (2021) and the co-editor, with Joseph Tanke, of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics (2012).  

If you are interested in presenting a program this summer in the Virtual Festival, please contact secretary-treasurer@aesthetics-online.org

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