Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens deutsche Schriften

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) founded modern aesthetics in the 18th century. In his Latin writings, he presents it as a «science of sensory cognition», placing it alongside logic as an equal and independent discipline. With his German-language writings, Baumgarten’s practical, that is, genuinely political aesthetics comes into focus in addition to his theoretical aesthetics, and these are now being researched and edited for the first time.

The edition is connected with the SNSF project «ARTS: The Formation of Practical Aesthetics in A. G. Baumgarten’s German Corpus», but it is not part of the project’s research mandate, which only provides for the development and long-term preservation of the data. The German-language corpus comprises more than 1,000 pages, some of which exist as historical first prints, some as unpublished manuscripts, and some as reprints of manuscripts. It includes lectures, letters (including fictional letters from a moral weekly), and meditations.

Project website and emerging edition: https://www.arts-snsf.uzh.ch/en.html

• Transkribus for automatic text recognition and the definition/annotation of text regions in PAGE-XML
• IIIF and DOI/ARK resolvers in collaboration with various libraries and archives

The edition data, in diplomatic transcription and linked to the original documents (via IIIF), are versioned and published as research data, freely accessible and openly licensed on the FAIR repository DaSCH. The edition that makes use of these data prepares them for a three-volume reader’s edition in the renowned Philosophische Bibliothek at Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, which includes commentary and introductions.

Co-editors: Prof. Dr. Frauke Berndt, Dr. Roland Spalinger