Cassirer and Baeumler: Historiographical Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/32244Keywords:
Enlightenment, birth of aesthetics, rationality/irrationality, individuality, artAbstract
This paper compares the reconstruction of the birth of eighteenth-century aesthetics proposed by Ernst Cassirer in his Philosophy of Enlightenment (1932) and that proposed by Alfred Baeumler in his 1923 essay The Problem of Irrationality. Beyond the similarities and differences between the two historiographical constructs, and especially between the theoretical frameworks and
philosophical projects they embody, it is worth noting the richness of the proposed frameworks, the extreme liveliness of the debate, and the highly topical relevance of the development—starting from admittedly very distant perspectives—of the concepts of identity and individuality.
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