In his first work, the poetics Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. Baumgarten frequently cites Horace’s Ars Poetica. Horace was highly esteemed by Baumgarten and his contemporaries, especially in the fields of poetics and art theory. Baumgarten uses Ars Poetica throughout Meditationes. but it is especially in the paragraphs introducing some of the key concepts of his philosophy that there is a significant amount of excerpts from Horace’s poetics. In this article, I examine if and how contemporary scholarly interpretations may have influenced these uses of Horace’s text and maybe even Baumgarten’s theory. Following a brief account of relevant commentaries as well as Horace’s position in contemporary art theory, I explore the implied interpretations of Ars Poetica in Baumgarten’s excerpts, focusing on his three key terms, phantasia. heterocosmica and methodum lucidam. Compared to the conception of Horace as expressed in the commentaries, this study suggests a complex interaction between those and Baumgarten’s art theory.

This article explores the genealogical and metaphysical grounds for the positive re-evaluation of the concept of “confusion”, which played a vital role in Baumgarten’s foundation of aesthetics as scientia cognitionis sensitivae. First, a reconsideration of Descartes’ and Leibniz’ conceptualisations of “confusion” attempts to identify the place of Baumgarten’s aesthetics within the rationalistic dilemma of evaluating moral and art-related thinking. Secondly, the way in which Baumgarten attempted to resolve the dilemma is explored by a close examination of his concept of “the aesthetic” and of how the concept changed in the course of his writings. The ultimate purpose of this article lies in illuminating an aspect of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, that is, an attempt to synthesize the cognitive and the ethical by means of a re-configuration o f the concept of “confusion”.

One of the most important concepts Baumgarten introduces in his Reflections on Poetry is the concept of sensible perfection. It is surprising that Baumgarten does not elaborate upon this concept in his Metaphysics, since it plays such an important role in the new science of aesthetics that he proposes at the end of the Reflections on Poetry and then further develops in the Aesthetics. This article considers the significance of the absence of sensible perfection from the Metaphysics and its implications for Baumgarten’s aesthetics, before tuming to the use Meier and Kant make of Baumgarten’s concept. In the end, this article shows that Baumgarten did not abandon his conception of sensible perfection in the Metaphysics, though its influence declined significantly after Kant rejected the idea that sensibility and the understanding could be distinguished by the perfections of their cognition.

The purpose of this article is to examine Baumgarten’s proposal - Aesthetica §140; analyzing the catalogue of the sensitive faculties of the human mind as well as the Topics of artistic production. Certainly, this would be equivalent to the conversion of the aesthetic subject and the artist natural talent into beauty and art criteria. This does not imply, however, reducing the latter to mere expressive subjectivity of feeling and emotion. Contrary, Baumgarten is still thinking that art and beauty are subject to rules; only those rules are based on the human psyche nature and, the rather peculiar function of her own cognitive abilities. Such conviction encourages his idea of an artistic creation founded up on Natural Topics; which is based on the “Empirie Psychology of the Moderns”. This article considers the presumption that the philosophical elaboration of that idea implies an historical rising of internal sense; both, as an authentic art’s abode and, as a supreme cognitive resource thanks to his conception in terms of “analogon rationis”. On the other hand, this article shows that Baumgarten did not develop the Psychological Topics of invention on his Aesthetica (1750-58); rather he developed the Psychological Topics from his first poetological writing - Meditationes de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735).

Als ein Beitrag zu einer Ästhetik des Schattens deutet der vorliegende Artikel auf die Verwandtschaft zwischen dem ästhetischen Schatten bei Alexander G. Baumgarten und den Gravuren von Francisco de Goya. Der Schatten zeigt sich dabei, nach einer kurzen Einführung in den Begriff, als der grundlegende Modus der Darstellung und der Möglichkeit der Erkenntnis im Allgemeinen. Ohne den Schatten, als das Dritte zwischen Licht und Finsternis, ist weder die Vernunft noch die Unvernunft einsehbar. Auch diese Einsicht gehört in die Epoche der Aufklärung.

Scholars are prone to emphasize A.G. Baumgarten’s foundation of aesthetics as a discipline in its own right and Kant’s use of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica as a handbook for his lectures on metaphysics. Nonetheless there are some further and deeper reasons for Baumgarten to mark a division between the so called Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition and the Kantian transcendental revolution. The goal of this paper is to take into account these reasons and to analyze them in order to show that they are rooted in psychology as it is treated in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. The paper’s aim is to highlight Baumgarten’s methodological approach, that is, the use of Leibnizian doctrines, which are exposed through the Wolffian order. The radical originality of this procedure can be adequately assessed only by virtue of its Kantian development.

This paper defends the Principle of Sufficient Reason, taking Baumgarten as its guide. The primary aim is not to vindicate the principle, but rather to explore the kinds of resources Baumgarten originally thought sufficient to justify the PSR against its early opponents. The paper also considers Baumgarten’s possible responses to Kant’s pre-Critical objections to the proof of the PSR. The paper finds that Baumgarten possesses reasonable responses to all these objections. While the paper notes that in the absence of a response to Kant’s Critical discussion of the PSR (which is omitted here due to limitations of space), this result does not vindicate the principle, it shows how this discussion provides a deeper understanding of what, according to Baumgarten, the PSR really assumes and intends, and prepares the way for a more responsible discussion of Kant’s critical objections to Baumgarten’s supposed proof.

The article treats as significant the formal coincidence between Kant’s presentation of the science of metaphysics in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” chapter of the first Critique and Alexander Baumgarten’s presentation of the same in the Metaphysica. From his comments on Baumgarten in the metaphysics lectures, the article shows that for Kant metaphysics in its traditional form lacked completeness and systematic order. Kant fits completeness into his architectonic plan of a scientific metaphysics by Converting Baumgartian ontology into an “analytic of the understanding”; Kant achieves the systematicity by modeling a rational “idea of the form of the whole” after Baumgarten’s tree-like ordering of the special sciences of metaphysics. Thus, Kant realizes the completeness and systematicity in a theoretical presentation of the science of metaphysics that he finds lacking in Baumgarten precisely by borrowing from the latter his scheme for metaphysics.

The article presents the Hobbesian connection between natural law and civil law, and denies that it involves a complete renounce of natural right. Therefore, the article sustains the permanence of a residual natural right, even after the birth of the Leviathan, without for that reason incurring in an insurmountable instability for the sovereign.

Leibniz strives to conciliate the liberty of divine law and the cosmic order with the freedom of human action, affïrming that all good and bad events compete to bring about the consummation of God’s plan for Creation. The tragic imperfection of its parts, which reflects in the misery of evil deeds, converts into the perfection of the whole through the action of divine providence. The evil and the suffering destined by the consequent will of God, which results from the competition of all the particular individual wills, represent the means to a greater good, predestined by the prior will of God. All are predestined to eternal salvation with many destined to eternal condemnation.

The aim of this work is to explain two important positions considering Voltaire’s reflection on history: first, it is glimpsed an angle explicitly devoted to the criticism of historical discourse, and second, one point connected to the humanity vision integrated to its progress. The main purpose unfolds in the interest in identifying the criticism to “The principle of the wonderful” as an unifying point of that dual position.

The “speculative” in Hegel can be defined as a dynamic of deseparation towards an identification of the end and the beginning. Hegelian dialectics is a speculative dialectics of contradiction, but even more so a dialectics of identity that has become - originating in a deseparating and reconciliating circle of difference and identity, end and beginning, subject and substance. Therefore, the objections put forward by Schelling (“being” before “thinking”) and the young Marx (“world” before “spirit”) have to be interpreted, from a Hegelian point of view, as the prolongation of a separation, of a reflexive dispositif which would endanger absolute knowledge of the absolute, that is, would be a fall-back on Kant.

O presente artigo traça a génese da questão do ser em Heidegger procurando evidenciar a sua íntim a articulação com o problema da possibilidad e da Metafísica como ciência. Mostra como foi através da leitura de Aristóteles, que o filósofo se deu conta da ausência, em Metafísica, de um sentido unitário e abrangente para o conceito de ser e da necessidade de suprir esta lacuna a fim de viabilizar qualquer intento consistente de nova sistemática. A seu ver, os grandes problemas da Ontologia prendem-se com a insuficiente clarificação daquele conceito, designadamente no que concerne a sua relação com o tempo. Os principais influxos do seu percurso filosófico até ao amadurecimento da problemática da obra-magna Ser e Tempo - o sistema de Metafísica escolástica, o neokantismo e a fenomenologia - são sempre acolhidos do ponto de vista da sua pertinência para a consecução do projecto, que anima o jovem filósofo, de reforma da Metafísica. No entanto, a experiência da primeira grande Guerra mundial e da crise de sentido dela decorrente fê-lo romper com a dogmática católica e o racionalismo académico da época e procurar junto do protestantismo e da filosofia existencial, então emergente, inspiração para um novo ponto de partida filosófico. O antigo projecto filosófico radicaliza-se neste outro de teor refundacional: trata-se não apenas de reformar, mas de inovar, lançando as bases de uma nova interpretação do ser a partir do tempo.

Na sua obra Spectres de Marx, Derrida parte da análise da tese II da obra de Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, onde o autor fala do índex messiânico que cabe ao historiador redescobrir e restaurar. Benjamin não se refere a este messianismo em termos teológicos nem tradicionais, mas pensa, a partir de uma ideia de secularização do messianismo, que contém um potencial inédito para a compreensão e leitura da história. Derrida segue-lhe o raciocínio e interpreta, de forma magnífica, em que consiste este carácter de “messiânico sem messianis mo” e qual o seu significado no contexto de um pensamento político e revolucionário.