Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the philosophical science of the beautiful, of the laws and forms of the artistic assimilation of the world, of the nature of art and of aesthetic perception. The term was introduced by Alexander Baumgarten (1735; developed in his 'Aesthetica,' 1750), who defined aesthetics as the 'science of sensory cognition.' The classic system of aesthetics was developed by Immanuel Kant ('Critique of the Power of Judgment,' with its doctrine of disinterested pleasure and the sublime) and Georg Hegel ('Lectures on Aesthetics,' with its conception of art as the sensory manifestation of the Idea). The main categories of aesthetics are the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the tragic, the comic, and harmony. For literary studies, aesthetics is a methodological foundation: it grounds the criteria of artistry, the specificity of figurative thinking, and the value orientations of interpretation. Ukrainian aesthetic thought is represented by Ivan Franko's 'From the Secrets of Poetic Creativity' (1898).