Aesthetics, philosophy and art

Aesthetics, philosophy and art In philosophy, aesthetics is the branch that studies the essence of the beautiful and the perception of the beauty of art, that is, taste. As a field of differentiated study, that is, as a discipline, aesthetics emerged in the eighteenth century, in the context of Enlightenment or Enlightenment. Already by the year 1735, the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) described aesthetics as "the science of sensibility and the relations of art with beauty" in his text Philosophical reflections on the poem. The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) would also do so in his Critique of Judgment, pointing out that aesthetics is "the branch of philosophy that studies and investigates the origin of pure feeling and its manifestation as art". However, the discussion about the nature of the beautiful is as old as philosophy and art. For this reason, it has been treated since ancient Greece by authors such as Plato and Aristotle. Plato theorized about beauty and art in works such as The Banquet and The Republic. In them, he introduced the notion of the arts as an imitation of the Idea (mimesis). See also Imitation. Aristotle, who had been a pupil of Plato, would do the same in works such as Poetic Art and Rhetoric and Politics, but would leave Platonic idealism aside to focus on a material approach. It will be he who develops the idea of ​​catharsis. These two authors represent, thus, the two main approaches to beauty analysis that have taken place in the West. From them, other authors have discussed the subject and its implications throughout history. Among them we can mention Plotinus, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo Da Vinci, René Descartes, Joseph Addison, Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Madame de Lambert, Diderot, Lessing, Voltaire, Wolff, Gottlieb Baumgarten , Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Shlegel, Novalis, Hegel, among others.