Abstract
A crucial epistemological question in Christian Wolff’s empirical psychology directly involves aesthetics: how does the representation of something take place? In the Psychologia empirica, Wolff explains what a representation is by comparing it with the formation of a picture or a sculpture. This conception of an image as a space-time ordering of empirical data is of great importance to Wolff’s theory of knowledge, but the link between representation and pleasure is of no less importance to his philosophy. These two aspects of his psychology—the image as a picture or a sculpture, and the representation as a pleasant anticipation of the object of desire—provide the foundation for a vigorous aesthetics, although the name of this discipline did not exist before Baumgarten, and they play an important role in the establishment of the idea of the autonomy of the image, thus calling into question the conception of mimesis as mere imitation.
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Notes
- 1.
The doctrine that a substance is an expression of the whole universe, and particularly that the soul is not affected by the body but has with it an expressive relation, is presented by Leibniz in the letters 56 and 57 to Arnauld from September and October 1687 (Leibniz, 2009, p. 238s).
- 2.
- 3.
According to Pietro Pimpinella (2005, p. 253), when Wolff reconciled his own theory of the passions with that of Leibniz, he was also aware of Descartes’ efforts in the Passions of the Soul.
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Suzuki, M., Spezzapria, M. (2021). Image Composition as an Aesthetic–Epistemological Problem in Wolff’s Empirical Psychology. In: Araujo, S.d.F., Pereira, T.C.R., Sturm, T. (eds) The Force of an Idea. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74435-9_9
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