[New Entry by Pierre Destrée on December 3, 2021.]
The term “aesthetics”, though deriving from the Greek (aisthetikos meaning “related to sense experience”), is a modern one, forged by Baumgarten as the title of his main book (Aesthetica, 1750). Only later did it come to name an entire field of philosophical research. Aristotle does not use that term. But after Plato, he does use the word mimetike (that is, literally, the art of producing a mimesis), and since he considers mimesis…