Alessandro Nannini

In this essay I explore the metaphorology of the cultivation of the mind in the early modern period, with special regard to the image of the “georgics of the mind”. To this end, I first intend to briefly go over the ancient background of the soul as a soil to till, with a focus on Cicero’s image of “cultura animi” and Philo of Alexandria’s use of “ψυχῆς γεωργική”. I then turn to Bacon, who regards the georgics of the mind as a fundamental part of ethics, and analyse how the idea of “georgics of the mind” was received in the German lands in the late 17th century (Placcius, Wesenfeld, Pufendorf), up to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In Baumgarten, the “georgics of the mind” constitutes the subjective precondition for the emergence of a body of arts and sciences (the encyclopaedia), which in turn is conceived as a horizontal map of fields to be cultivated within the territory of erudition. In this way, the georgics of the mind helps lay the groundwork for the modern conception of culture as a collective endeavour.

In this paper, I reconstruct the genealogy of Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics as “art of thinking beautifully” and its implications for the status of aesthetics. I first analyze the rising interest in a special kind of “art of thinking” dealing with poetic and rhetorical writings, which is clearly stated in Dominique Bouhours at the end of the seventeenth century. Secondly, I discuss Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics as “ars pulchre cogitandi,” which refers to aesthetics as both a systematic discipline and as internalized proficiency or habitus. I then illustrate the fortunes of this definition in coeval logic and aesthetics. In the last part, I examine the crisis of this definition in Herder, who advocates the thesis that aesthetics is solely a science. With the loss of its practical side that the idea of “ars pulchre cogitandi” entailed, I argue, aesthetics is no longer expected to answer the question “how shall I think?” and, ultimately, “how shall I live?” but is reduced to a theory of a certain set of entities – the works of art. By disowning its sisterhood with logic, I conclude, aesthetics ends up forging an enduring bond with ontology.

In this essay, I aim to reconstruct the first systematic encounter between the modern discipline of psychology and the philosophical and theological tradition of the therapy of the soul in the German Enlightenment. With a detailed investigation of Johann Christian Bolten’s Thoughts about Psychological Cures (1751) and its context, I intend to argue for the importance of the role of Baumgarten’s and Meier’s aesthetics as the connecting link between the previous tradition of medicina mentis and the psychological turn in the therapy of the soul. In more detail, I will examine the influence of aesthetics on three different aspects of the psychological cures, that is, the doctor’s visit to the patient; the treatment of the lower faculties of the soul; and therapeutic efficacy. Finally, I will elucidate the consequences of the foundation of the therapy of the soul on psychological principles for both philosophy and medicine up to the moment in which the “medicine of the soul” will start to be spelled with the Graecizing name of “psychiatry” at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In this discussion piece, I will comment on the collective volume, edited by Jerold J. Abrams, Shusterman’s Somaesthetics. From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art (2022). I will articulate my reflections around three main themes, which intersect the theme of several of the essays of the volume: I will first of all consider the concept of transfiguration, commenting upon the difference between Danto’s hermeneuticist perspective and Shusterman’s somaesthetic reinterpretation, with special regard to his performative experiment, the Man in Gold. Secondly, I will turn to a possible consequence entailed by this reinterpretation concerning the relation between aesthetics and art. Finally, I will turn to the controversy between somaesthetics and pathic aesthetics, and comment on a possible way to reconcile some elements of both, starting from the condition of the suffering body.

In this paper, I intend to analyze Baumgarten’s position about the dietetic care of the body in its relation to nascent aesthetics, with special regard to the problem of physical exercise. On the one hand, I will show that physical exercise can acquire aesthetic value with the example of the somatic fine arts. On the other hand, I will demonstrate that dietetics is also seminal for the emergence of every act of beautiful thinking. Eventually, I will bring to the fore the dietetic potential of beauty itself. In this way, it will be possible to better appraise the constitutive link between health and beauty in the founding of aesthetics as an independent branch of philosophy.

In the presentation of his project about ‘somaesthetics’, Richard Shusterman claimed that the recurring neglect of the body in aesthetics was disastrously introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) in his first formulation of aesthetics as a discipline in the mid-eighteenth century. In the present essay I aim to call this thesis into question, investigating for the first time the role of the body in Baumgarten’s thought and focusing on its significance for the founding of aesthetics. First, I consider Baumgarten’s doctrine of the body in general and of the human body in particular, in its relationship with the soul. I then turn to discuss Baumgarten’s resumption of the scholastic discipline of ‘somatology’ as a philosophical investigation of the body in both its theoretical and practical – namely, dietetical, side. On these bases, I deal with two examples of dietetic embellishment of the body, one presented by Baumgarten himself (cosmetics) and the other put forward by his pupil and co-founder of disciplinary aesthetics Georg Friedrich Meier (physical exercise and somatic fine arts). Subsequently, I explore the ways in which Meier and Baumgarten use dietetics to foster beautiful thinking. Finally, I conclude that nascent aesthetics is concerned with the aesthetic care of the body both insofar as the body can be a stage of aesthetic value and insofar as the body is a necessary presupposition for beautiful thinking.

Although pregnancy as a semantic and perceptual density is a central notion of aesthetics, scholarship has not yet conducted a genealogical inquiry into its early-modern roots. It is the aim of this investigation to make a contribu-tion in this direction. My thesis is, that the idea of aesthetic pregnancy emerges in Alexander G. Baumgarten’s philoso-phy as the outcome of the convergence between Leibnizian assumptions and a series of hermeneutical categories, which have hitherto been overlooked. After analyzing the role of pregnancy in Lutheran hermeneutics, I examine its reception in Baumgarten’s phi-losophy, in the attempt to enhance the relationships with the earlier tradition. By reconfiguring the semantic density with the instruments of empirical psy-chology, I argue, Baumgarten is able to shift pregnancy from the hermeneutical domain of sense to the metaphysical domain of sensibility, thus paving the way for its fortune in future aesthetics.

In this essay, I discuss Baumgarten’s neglected doctrine of taste. In particular I investigate his definition of taste as the judgment of the senses against the backdrop of the philosophical debate of his day, pointing out the biblical and classical sources of the idea of a judging aisthesis. In addition, I analyse the radical change that the definition of taste as the judgment of the senses brings about in the idea of both taste and the judgment of the senses with regard to Wolff. Highlighting the link with the issue of analogon rationis and beauty, I conclude that the concept of taste is at the core of Baumgarten’s new aesthetic project.

In this essay, I investigate Baumgarten’s doctrine of the six perfections of knowledge (wealth, magnitude, truth, clarity, certainty, and life), which is famously one of the most characteristic and enigmatic features of his philosophy. Recent scholarship has almost unanimously stressed the rhetorical background of the categories. Instead, I argue that Baumgarten elaborates his theory in close relationship with coeval philosophy. To support this claim, I examine the position of some Thomasian philosophers, such as Johann Liborius Zimmermann, who had indicated a list of criteria similar to that of Baumgarten. Moreover, I analyse the distinction between formal and material perfections, tracing it back to the Wolffian milieu. On these bases, I propose a new reconstruction of Baumgarten’s doctrine, with particular attention to its aesthetic application. Finally, I outline the reception of the six categories in the late German Enlightenment until Kant.