Reflections on Poetry: Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus

Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus makes newly accessible the 1735 dissertation that inaugurated the modern discipline of aesthetics. Long remembered chiefly as the inventor of the term, Baumgarten here sets out the principles of a “science of sensate cognition,” laying philosophical foundations for poetry and the arts alongside logic and metaphysics. Through a rigorously deductive method, he defines poetry a...