section_path: Etymology
section_name: Etymology
paragraph_text: Etymology
  
  The word aesthetic is derived from the Ancient Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthētikós, "perceptive, sensitive, pertaining to sensory perception"), which in turn comes from αἰσθάνομαι (aisthánomai, "I perceive, sense, learn") and is related to αἴσθησις (aísthēsis, "perception, sensation"). Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start with the series of articles on "The Pleasures of the Imagination", which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712.
  
  The term aesthetics was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (English: "Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining the poem") in 1735; Baumgarten chose "aesthetics" because he wished to emphasize the experience of art as a means of knowing. Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics in the fragment Aesthetica (1750) is occasionally considered the first definition of modern aesthetics.
  
  The term was introduced into the English language by Thomas Carlyle in his Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825).