Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714-1762), German philosopher, born in Berlin. He studied with the German philosopher and mathematician Christian Wolff at the University of Halle and was influenced by the work of another German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Baumgarten, the first modern philosopher to approach the question of beauty systematically, introduced the term aesthetics and defined the experience of beauty as the sensory recognition of perfection. Between 1750 and 1758 he issued two volumes of his Esthetics. He also wrote Ethics (1740), Natural Law (1765), and General Philosophy (1770).