The Origins of the Transcendental Subjectivity: On Baumgarten’s Psychology

Scholars are prone to emphasize A.G. Baumgarten’s foundation of aesthetics as a discipline in its own right and Kant’s use of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica as a handbook for his lectures on metaphysics. Nonetheless there are some further and deeper reasons for Baumgarten to mark a division between the so called Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition and the Kantian transcendental revolution. The goal of this paper is to take into account these reasons and to analyze them in order to show that they are rooted in psychology as it is treated in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. The paper’s aim is to highlight Baumgarten’s methodological approach, that is, the use of Leibnizian doctrines, which are exposed through the Wolffian order. The radical originality of this procedure can be adequately assessed only by virtue of its Kantian development.