This project aims to investigate the coeval birth of the aesthetic and the historical science in the German mid-eighteenth century as the outcome of that same intellectual change which leads from the crisis of Wolffian intellectualism to the enhancement of the values of the concrete and the singular in the Spätaufklärung. To this aim, I intend to analyze firstly the role of the cognitio historica, which makes it possible to shift the foundation of the two disciplines from a rhetorical to a logical domain. After examining the debate within Wolffianism about the necessity of an extension of logic, I investigate how aesthetics and history fulfil this desideratum. The point is to examine the strategies whereby both these disciplines emphasize the knowledge of the individual, each of them advancing a claim of truth independent from logical truth, which allows a break with the tradition of late-humanistic Aristotelian science and an early approach to the issue of the limits of reason.

A full-length study is available here.