Kierkegaard’s Religious Aesthetics as a Basis for a Dialogue Among Religions
Kierkegaard’s Religious Aesthetics as a Basis for a Dialogue Among Religions

Summary/Abstract: Even if Western philosophy has always reflected on beauty and on art, aesthetics is a modern discipline. Aesthetics was born in the moment that three philosophical threads – which had had until then a more or less independent life – were unified: philosophy of beauty, philosophy of art, philosophy of sensibility or perception. We can even give the date of its birth: 1735, when Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, at the age of 21, published his Reflections on Poetry. He identifies beauty with the perfection of sensible knowledge and the perfection of sensible knowledge with poetry or art in general. And at the end of his work, Baumgarten asks himself which name this science must have. He returns to the traditional distinction between aisthetá and noetá, which is Greek for „sensible things” and „thought things.” Since the name of the science of „thought things” is logic, the name of the science of „sensible things” must be episteme aisthetike, aesthetical science, or just aesthetics. [...]

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