The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "Aesthetica bina: Baumgarten and Burke" (Aesthetica bina: Baumgarten e Burke) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics (Palermo, October 18-19, 1985) on the occasion of the Italian edition of the Meditationes philosophophicæ de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of Edmund Burke.

Rosario Assunto, The term "aesthetica" and "sensus communis"
The author attributes both modernity and genius to Baumgarten's aesthetic thought. The dawn of aesthetics was first kindled by Baumgarten's courageous rejection of Descarte's inventories and by the impulse he gave to the revaluation, following on from Leibniz, of a «cognitio sensitiva» seen not merely as sense but also as free play of faculties, imaginative knowledge, thus anticipating the inspiration of Kant's a priori synthesis. The object of this «gnoseologia inferior» is not truth but the perfectibility of the beautiful as «ars pulcre cogitandi». Hence the subjective principle is once again legitimated and is directed aesthetically towards the beautiful and is no longer simply a source of errors. In this way Baumgarten, identifying the field, the faculties and the object, marks the legitimate rise of the aesthetic strategy of the beautiful within the cognitive process itself.

Francesco Piselli, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's "Meditationes Philosophicæ"
Having first illustrated what seems to be A. G. Baumgarten's overcoming of contemporary gnoseological approaches to knowledge, the paper remarks on the theory of productive imagination, showing that Baumgarten sets no limits to the number and quality of representations to be introduced into poetry, as long as they are clear and make sense and contribute to the perfection of the poetic whole through their selfgenerating power and the rule of brevity. The paper also presents Baumgarten's model of a poem as well as his figure of the poet as an analogical maker, emphasizing its problematic character. The paper concludes by saying that Baumgarten's aesthetics extends poeticity not only to a poem but also to all not-intellectual sectors of knowledge.

Ermanno Migliorini, Baumgarten: "pro positu corporis"
In his thesis for his doctorate (Meditationes Philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, 1735), G. Baumgarten gives an outline of sensitive oration, the poetic oration that can arouse the emotions: namely a science of sensitive knowledge. In Aesthetica (1750-58), he not only don't confirms this science, but also emphasizes, among other things, the importance of the position of the body (in accordance with the doctrines of Leibniz and Wolff) which generates aesthetic impulses, stirring "the depths of the soul". He mentions movement and excitement caused by a gallop on horseback, the major sights of the world (the sun, the sea), drinking the water from springs sacred to the muses, drinking wine, adoring a beautiful woman, "pro positu corporis". This physical and sensitive tendency has left deep traces in the history of aesthetics.

Franco Fanizza, Baumgarten and modernity of aesthetics (Confirmations and revisions)
Undoubtedly Baumgarten's aesthetics, starting from the assumption of "amicissimum connubium" between "philosophia" and "poematis pangendi scientia", appropriated, in this way, the general statement and the order of gnoseological development which have always belonged to the great Logic. This serves to explain why Baumgarten's aesthetics is indulgent "but also severe" with specifically modern phenomena of aesthetisation which escape the "disciplina aesthetica". But just the specific inquiry of such a discipline urges Baumgarten to make the most of the "argumentative dimension" of and in aesthetics, to let the problem of "veritas aesthetica" converge towards the oratory, so much so that it leads this philosopher, traditionally Leibnitian, to an objectively different knowledge model. It is a model by which being must become "word", the model where knowledge becomes "etos persuasorium" and, therefore, it is possible to perceive the identity between "talking well" and "living well" that Gracián had already theorized in the 17th century and particularly the eighteenthcentury modernity interpreted as «the civilization of good manners». Baumgarten never faced the problem of the word directly. Nevertheless his aesthetics is an aesthetics of intervention and mediation of the word and, therefore, of the "soggetto" who uses such an intervention and mediation, recognizing all the power the word itself has to say the world or, if you like, to hold it fast in its way. Perhaps nowadays we find it difficult to understand such a position. It is because the most we can do is to exercise a more or less weak technique of significance. Actually we get experience in an aesthetic reality which is rather a kind of drift we ourselves are blown to and in which the "soggetto" is practically not to be found.

Giuseppe Sertoli, Edmund Burke and the parabola of the sublime
The essay aims to place Burke's Enquiry in the modern history of the sublime. Making terror - a passion concerned with individual selfpreservation - the ruling principle of everything that is sublime, Burke views the sublime experience as an undermining of subjectivity, a loss of ego consequent upon a real attraction for death. He thus opposes the tradition of Longinus, according to which the experience consisted instead in a "proud" enhancing of subjectivity. At the end of the 18th century, there was a reaction against this idea with the Critique of Judgement . Without denying the giddy moment that the ego experiences before what goes beyond it, Kant encompasses it, neoclassically, in a movement which, asserting the (rational and moral) superiority of man over nature, fully restores Subjectivity and opposes the Life of the Spirit to the attraction of death. However, after Kant, and in opposition toKant, Burke's version of the sublime turns up again - tacitly - in the major seventeenthcentury theorizations: in Hegel, for whom the experience of the sublime is the «vanishing of the finite in the infinite»; in Schopenhauer, for whom it is the turning in off the will upon itself and the flowing of life into nothingness; and lastly in Freud, whose death wish - the tendency of the organism to go back to the inorganic state - must be seen as the ultimate outcome of that passion for annihilation with which Burke identifies the delight given by the sublime.

Vita Fortunati, The Rhetoric of the Sublime in PseudoLonginus and Edmund Burke
This essay suggests a reappraisal of the Sublime as a central category in the field of aesthetics and literary criticism, considering that structuralism is going through a critical phase. In the rhetoric of the Sublime, the reader, tradition and intertextuality are focused on again. Above all we have tried to point out that it is a dynamic category played out between the text and the reader. As PseudoLonginus had already suggested, the Sublime arouses in those who feel it sensations of both annihilation and elation. In Burke's Enquiry too, the subject perceiving the Sublime becomes the focal point. Sublime objects are always seen from the point of view of the person enjoying them, on whom the "sublimity" of the object depends. Burke analyses in detail the type of language needed to obtain the sublime effect. In this respect, he is a forerunner of Romantic theories in making a distinction between a referential language and a poetic one. A poetic word is able to arouse sublime effects for it does not describe but suggests, and hence overwhelms the reader. A comparison between the two treatises by PseudoLonginus and Burke on the Sublime has enabled us to point out how a particular use of quotations can be found in both of them. Quotations are essential, since the sublime cannot be defined in itself but is the outcome of a series of quotations from those literary texts which have traditionally been considered "sublime".

Renato Barilli, Burke, Kant and Leopardi
The comparison between Burke and Kant must not be made only in relation to the sublime, but must be extended to the considerations that both philosophers make on beauty, and even before this to certain characteristics of their respective systems. Kant is heavily impregnated with a PostRenaissance and Baroque view, borrowed from English empiricism through Bacon and Locke, according to which the faculties of taste, imagination and wit, which deal with the beautiful and the sublime - make up a "middle ground" between our other cognitive and moral - faculties. In this line of thought Kant found the first formulation of that "Mittelglied", that link between senses, intellect and reason which he sought insistently in the last phase of his caress. Any comparison with Leopardi must also take place on the terrain of beauty, seeing that the poet had no great liking for the sublime, regarded by him as a onesided and excessive faculty, such as to upset the search for that right middle point that balance between the various activities of the mind, in which, in his opinion, poetry should consist.