Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder's Critique of Kant's Aesthetics

Abstract

The philosophical discipline of aesthetics, as is well known, did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it to mean episte*me* aisthetike*, or the science of what is sensed and imagined. But Baumgarten’s denomination of the field was an adult baptism: without the benefit of a name, aesthetics had been part of philosophy since Plato attacked the educational value of many forms of art in the Republic and Aristotle briefly defended them in his fragmentary Poetics.