Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

Both his parents died early, and he was taught by Martin Georg Christgau where he learned Hebrew and became interested in Latin poetry.

[6] Previously the word aesthetics had merely meant "sensibility" or "responsiveness to stimulation of the senses" in its use by ancient writers.

By trying to develop an idea of good and bad taste, he also in turn generated philosophical debate around this new meaning of aesthetics.

The word had been used differently since the time of the ancient Greeks to mean the ability to receive stimulation from one or more of the five bodily senses.

A science of aesthetics would be, for Baumgarten, a deduction of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from individual "taste".

Baumgarten may have been motivated to respond to Pierre Bonhours' (b.1666) opinion, published in a pamphlet in the late 17th century, that Germans were incapable of appreciating art and beauty.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant declared that Baumgarten's aesthetics could never contain objective rules, laws, or principles of natural or artistic beauty.

For Kant, an aesthetic judgment is subjective in that it relates to the internal feeling of pleasure or displeasure and not to any qualities in an external object.

)Whatever the limitations of Baumgarten's theory of aesthetics, Frederick Copleston credits him with playing a formative role in German aesthetics, extending Christian Wolff's philosophy to topics that Wolff did not consider, and demonstrating the existence of a legitimate topic for philosophical analysis that could not be reduced to abstract logical analysis.