Metaphysics ― A Critical Translation With Kant's Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials

Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), an influential German philosopher preceding Immanuel Kant, is remembered mainly as a founder of modern aesthetics. Yet his manual on metaphysics was one of the chief textbooks of philosophical instruction in latter 18th-Century Germany. Originally published in Latin, Kant used the Metaphysics for nearly four decades as the basis for lectures on metaphysics, anthropology and religion. Kant composed many of the preparatory sketches for the Critique of Pure Reason in the blank interleaved pages of his personal copy.

Available for the first time in English, this critical translation draws from the original seven Latin editions and Georg Friedrich Meier’s 18th-century German translation. Together with a historical and philosophical introduction, extensive glossaries and notes, the text is supported by translations of Kant’s elucidations and notes, Eberhard’s insertions in the 1783 German edition and texts from the writings of Meier and Wolff. For scholars of Kant, the German Enlightenment and the history of metaphysics, Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysics is an essential, authoritative resource to a significant philosophical text.

Alexander Baumgarten was born in Berlin on 17 June 1714 to Jacob Baumgarten, a Protestant evangelical preacher, and Rosina Elizabeth, nee Wiedemannin. After being raised in the pietistic communities of Berlin and later Halle, Baumgarten was among the first to teach the controversial philosophy of Christian Wolff (1769-1764). By order of the king, he moved to Frankfurt on the Order in 1739, where he remained until his death in 1762. While at Frankfurt, Baumgarten wrote his most influential philosophical works: Metaphysics (1739), Philosophical Ethics (1740), and Aesthetics (2 Vols, 1750 & 1757). It is as formulated in these works that the Leibniz-Wolff tradition was chiefly communicated to later German philosophers, including Immanuel Kant. Today Baumgarten is also regarded as a central founder of modern aesthetics.

John Hymers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at La Salle University, USA, where he teaches modern philosophy.

Courtney D. Fugate is Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.