In this sense, aesthetics is considered to be parallel to logic: while logic is committed to higher gnoseology, and thereby to the higher cognitive powers of the mind, aesthetics takes on the challenge of developing an ‘organon’ for the lower cognitive powers and sets beauty in thinking as its ultimate goal. While Baumgarten regarded aesthetics first and foremost as the “science of sensible knowledge,” he also defined it as a theory of the liberal arts (theoria liberalium artium), a lower gnoseology (gnoseologia inferior), the art of thinking beautifully (ars pulcre cogitandi), and the art of the analogue of reason (ars analogi rationis) (Aesth § 1). At this university, he began to lecture on aesthetics (1742/1743) and published the first volume of his often-cited Aesthetica in 1750 (the second volume was released, unfinished, in 1758). Thus, while Baumgarten’s aesthetics intends to provide experimentalism with a philosophical foundation, I will conclude, this very experimentalism lies, in turn, at the heart of his own project.Ī King’s order, Baumgarten was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Frankfurt on the Oder in 1740, where he remained until his death in 1762. On the other hand, I will argue that experimental culture became key to achieving the ultimate goal of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, which is beauty. On the one hand, I intend to demonstrate that Baumgarten tried to provide the experimental practices of his contemporaries with a unique epistemological ground, namely, the aesthetic art of experience. Delving into the mutual ties between these two disciplines in the first half of the German eighteenth century, I will argue that both hinge on a notion of experience based on sensuous knowledge, obtained through the use of the outer senses and the inner sense, respectively. I will then turn to his conception of experience in the context of his age, with special regard to the two fields that most emphasized the relevance of experimentalism: natural science and theology. To do so, I will begin by briefly sketching Baumgarten’s position on aesthetics in general. More specifically, it is the aim of this essay to analyze the impact of the philosophical discourse about experience and experimentalism on Baumgarten’s aesthetics as well as the reasons why Baumgarten, in turn, considered aesthetics to be essential to that very discourse. Since Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) was the first to coin the word ‘aesthetics’ and to regard this discipline as a science, the present chapter will mainly deal with his conception. It is less clear, however, how this experimental tradition actually influenced the origin of aesthetics as a science in its own right. Scientists who viewed the senses as essential cognitive instruments importantly contributed to setting up the loose framework out of which the discipline of aesthetics arose. In the attempt to better understand the causes of diabetes, for instance, the English physician Thomas Willis drank some urine of a patient, stating that it “was wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with Honey or Sugar.” Even taste was considered useful in experimental practice. Wepfer, for example, claims with regard to his anatomical observations that the existence of a visible and tangible part in the human body can only be proved through the eyes and the dexterous hand of the observer. Whoever wishes to know what is in question (whether it is perceptible, or not) must either see for himself or be credited with belief in the experts, and he will be unable to learn or be taught with greater certainty by any other means.Īlong with sight, touch was regarded as a crucial means to prove the existence of body parts. In his Exercitatio anatómica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (Anatomical Studies on the Motion of the Heart and Blood, 1628), William Harvey explains that scientists who carry out autopsies in experiments (experimenta ocularia) importantly rely on the testimony of their own eyes: There is no doubt that the senses played a prominent role in seventeenthcentury experimental practices.