Abstract
The onset of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the 1780s with its call for "necessary" and "universally valid" principles of reason as the fundament for philosophy and science constituted an unprecedented challenge for the German tradition of philosophical aesthetics. This, founded by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten upon the Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics of perfection, was originally conceived as a "science of sensible cognition", including beauty and art as its perfect forms.
However, after the Critique of Pure Reason, the scientific status of this discipline was all but shaken to its foundations. In a footnote to the first Critique Kant resolutely dismissed the notion that a judgment of beauty could ever be justified on rational grounds (such as the principle of perfection), for the criteria of aesthetic appreciation are "merely empirical".
As a consequence, aesthetics, as a theory of beauty, art, and taste, can never gain the status of "true science". Such a provocative assertion, however, did not remain unanswered.
A decisive answer came at the end of the 1780s from a young professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764-1801). His polemic against Kant's thesis, and more specifically his argument for transcendental sources of pleasure and taste are the subject of my study.