A review of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten‘s Ästhetik. Latin-German edition. Trans., preface, notes, indexes by Dagmar Mirbach. 2 vols (vol. 1, pp. LXXX, 1--595; vol. 2, pp. IX, 596--1305). Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007, ISBN 3787317732. This is the first complete German translation of the two volumes of Baumgarten’s Aesthetics from 1750 and 1758.

In German pre-critical aesthetics, the term Betrachtung (contemplation) was coined to describe the reception of beauty and art. It was also used by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), and by Bernard Bolzano in his treatise On the Concept of Beauty (1843). Both Bolzano and Kant tied the judgment of taste (beauty) to the mere contemplation of the initial object. However, each of them meant something different by this act, and each accorded it a different importance. The study (...) describes Kant’s and Bolzano’s conceptions of mere contemplation, compares them and shows that Bolzano’s concept should be understood as a content modification of Kant’s innovative procedure. (shrink)

Carl Heinrich Seibt’s Prague Lectures on the Schöne Wissenschaften: The Beginnings of Aesthetics in Bohemia Carl Heinrich Seibt (1735–1806) was the founder of modern Bohemian aesthetics, that is, thinking about taste, beauty, and fine art, which he developed in a living language. Yet little is known about the content of his lectures on the Schöne Wissenschaften or his views on aesthetics. The following article aims to fill this gap in four respects. It explains why the topic has so far been (...) neglected; it gives a summary of the now known sources from which we may draw our knowledge of the topics of art theory, the individual kinds of art, and general aesthetics, with which Seibt was concerned in his lectures. It presents the standpoints which he held in them, and it puts them into the European context of the period, particularly German aesthetics. It aims primarily to determine whether the accessible sources contain traces of influences other than those of his teachers at Leipzig, who are mentioned in the secondary literature: Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) and Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769), including the important authorities recognized by them, in particular Charles Batteux (1713–1780). The article shows that Seibt’s views were also influenced by Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, representatives of a generation of German aestheticians younger than his teachers. (shrink)

The study examines the concept of the interesting in the aesthetic system of Anton Müller, full professor of aesthetics and classical literature at Prague University in the years 1823–1842. The study describes how he worked with the concept of the interesting; it companies his approach with the earlier German reflections on this concept, selected according to their response in Bohemian and Austrian aesthetics, and compares these findings with the existing literature about the interesting. The study shows that the privileged role (...) of the interesting in Müller's theory is caused by the restraint of a significant part of the Austrian pre-March aesthetics towards the Critique Judgement, which, despite Kant's objections, insisted on the significance of the interesting for beauty and art. The condition described does not allow Müller's privileged way of dealing with the concept of the interesting to be regarded as an attempt to revive the concept, which had been forbidden by Kant, as his approach could have been understood from the perspective of German aesthetics, but rather as the highest possible level of privileging of the interesting, crowning the traditional Austrian approach to this concept. (shrink)

This article considers Karl Heinrich Seibt’s plan for a course in aesthetics at Prague University. First, using archive materials, it presents an historical introduction to the establishment of the chair in 1763. Michael Wögerbauer then compares the linguistic ‘modernity’of the manuscript-draft of the syllabus with the printed version, and Tomáš Hlobil analyses the concept of the schöne Wissenschaften, which Seibt used in the two texts in four different ways.

A review of Ernst Stöckmann´s Anthropologische Ästhetik: Philosophie, Psychologie und ästhetische Theorie der Emotionen im Diskurs der Aufklärung (Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung 39. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2009, 298 S. 978-3-484-81039-6).

This essay endeavours to cover and clarify the extraordinarily long and complicated approval process – unparalleled in the history of European aesthetics – of the first Austrian court-approved university textbook of aesthetics of local provenance, Franz Ficker’s Aesthetik. The detailed account of the negotiations preceding the approval is followed by general conclusions concerning the nature of Austrian aesthetics, the operation of Austrian universities, and Austrian university policy in the period preceding the March 1848 revolution. The article includes translation of selected (...) passages from the Ficker’s textbook. (shrink)

Erste Monografie über Franz Fickers Ästhetik. Die Ästhetik des institutionell wichtigsten Universitätsästhetikers der österreichischen Monarchie des Vormärz wird institutionell als Bestandteil der österreichischen Universitätspolitik und ideell als Bestandteil der Geschichte der mitteleuropäischen Ästhetik untersucht.

The work aims at describing Kant's concept of poetry in the context of his opinions on language expressed both in the Critique of Judgment and in the Critique of Pure Reason. The analysis shows that Kant understood the relationship between language and concepts as closer than that between language and aesthetic ideas. Simultaneously he designated the aesthetic idea as nature of poetry (of fine arts generally). This enables to understand Kant's nonlinguistic characterization of poetry which veiled the difference between the (...) successive linguistic expression of poetry and the coexistent expression of visual arts as identified by the aestheticians of the Enlightenment again. (shrink)

This article presents a summary of the main views in Dambeck’s lectures on aesthetics on the basis of all known sources and compares the views thus obtained with views developed in German aesthetics in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, with the aim of finding their chief source and reintegrating them both into German aesthetics and, more narrowly, into the aesthetics taught at Prague University. Johann Heinrich Dambeck constructed his lecture series on the plan of Zschokke’s textbook Ideen (...) zur psychologischen Aesthetik (1793) which has never been taken into account in any other research on his lectures. The close link between Dambeck’s lectures and this textbook compels us to revise the current understanding of the nature of their ideas. Dambeck has so far been most often unproblematically presented as an adherent and disseminator of Kant’s and Schiller’s ideas about aesthetics in the Bohemian Lands. The key textbook on which he bases his university lecture series is, however, intentionally un-Kantian. Zschokke’s Ideen is part of the psychological-anthropological stream of Late-Enlightenment German aesthetics. (shrink)

Although research to date has helped in important ways to shed light on the penetration of Burke’s Enquiry into the German-language area, a comprehensive treatment of this reception as a process distinguished not only by changes over time, but also characterized by regional variations, remains lacking. Based on the lectures on aesthetics by August Gottlieb Meißner at Prague University in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the paper seeks to illuminate this underexposed regional aspect. The first phase of the (...) reception of the Enquiry took place especially in Berlin immediately after its publication in London in 1757. The second phase can be located mainly in the northern maritime centres of German culture, particularly Königsberg, Riga, Hamburg as well as Copenhagen. Christian Garve’s translation, published anonymously by Hartknoch in Riga in 1773, and Kant’s Critique of Judgement constitute two peaks of north-German interest in Burke’s Enquiry. The intense reception of the Critique of Judgement within German aesthetics around and after 1800 subsequently led to the polemic with the British author becoming a part of Idealist interpretations for the next few decades. Outlining the three centres of the German reception of Burke’s Enquiry begs the question which of them should be connected with Meißner’s remarks concerning Burke’s ideas. Leipzig is presented as another important German-language centre disseminating knowledge of Burke’s Enquiry, especially in the first half of the Seventies, moreover the decisive intermediary for the penetration of the Enquiry into the south-German Roman Catholic areas, Prague in particular. (shrink)