Art Work

What kind of knowledge do works of art provide? Is this knowledge different from other forms of thought? What kind of knowledge could be provided by constructing a 'history' of such phenomena? What would a history of such objects consist of?. What significance would it have?

Although the notion of sensory knowledge as inferior to rational thinking had a long tradition in European theology, philosophy, and psychology (a tradition which is still alive), in the middle of the eighteenth century the argument began to be made that such knowledge had a perfection of its own, which in its way was analogous to that of logic or reason. It came to be argued that there were in fact two distinct but analogous kinds of knowing, and that in consequence there should be two kinds of theory or 'science' of knowledge corresponding to each: logic and aesthetics.

he first notable appearance of the term aesthetics in its modern sense was as the title of a 600-page book written in Latin and published in 1750 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the Aesthetica. 1 It was coined to denote a special cognitive domain that of sensual thinking, which he argued was distinct from rational or logical thought. Baumgarten's new 'science of sensible knowledge' would deal as fully with truth as did logic, but truth in so far as it is known through the senses. For Baumgarten, sensible knowledge was a faculty of the mind that he termed an analogon rationis—an analogue of reason: in short, a unique mode of reasoning in its own right.