Aesthetica Preprint, 54 (December 1998) Summary

The present volume includes some of the essays that were presented at the seminar "Baumgarten and the Prospects of Aesthetics" (Baumgarten e gli orizzonti dell'estetica), which was sponsored by the Centro Internazionale Studi di Estetica. The seminar took place in Palermo (9-10 October 1998) in connection with the publication of the Italian edition of Baumgarten's Lessons on Aesthetics (Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni, 1998), which is part of a larger project that, over a three-year period, will culminate in the publication of a new Italian edition of Baumgarten's Meditationes and of his Æsthetica.
In his introduction ("Baumgarten, Aesthetics, and the 21st Century"), Luigi Russo focuses on Baumgarten's crucial importance in the history of aesthetics, and emphasizes the unique "modernity" of his aesthetic approach within the intellectual climate of the end of the second millennium. These issues are expanded upon in the essays by Leonardo Amoroso ("The 'Younger Sister' of Logic"), Pietro Pimpinella ("Re-reading Baumgarten"), Maurizio Ferraris ("A History and Counter-History of Aesthetics from Kant to Nietzsche"), Elio Franzini ("Aesthetic Truth and Common Sense"), and Emilio Garroni ("Prospects of the Aesthetic Experience"). The volume includes an Appendix edited by Salvatore Tedesco, who presents an important unpublished text by Baumgarten, i.e., the second of the Philosophical Letters of Aletheophilus.