ABSTRACT
Philosophy of literature was not a named subfield of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Indeed, aesthetics itself had only been so named in Germany in 1735 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (see Baumgarten 1954, §CXVI), and the name for the more general field came into use in Britain only in the nineteenth century, but still without a name for the subfield. Moses Mendelssohn did draw a distinction between the “fine arts” and “fine sciences” (schöne Künste or beaux artes and schöne Wissenschaften or belles lettres), defining the former as those that use “natural signs,” such as their appearance, to “express” or refer to their objects and the latter as those that use “arbitrary signs,” such as words, which refer to their objects only by convention, and said that the latter include “poetry and rhetoric,” while the former would include not only the visual arts but also arts employing natural tones and gestures, thus music and dance as well (Mendelssohn 1997, pp. 177–8). But Mendelssohn did not argue that the philosophy of the arts that employ artificial signs constitutes a special discipline within aesthetics, and in any case his terminological distinction was not widely adopted—we find no trace of it in Kant’s classification of the arts, for example, though Mendelssohn influenced Kant’s aesthetics in many other ways.
