ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the cognitive value. Insights from continental aesthetics will be reconstructed with the aid of concepts from Nelson Goodman's analytic aesthetics. The connection between the conceptual indeterminacy of the work of art and aesthetic cognition was already established by A. G. Baumgarten. By replacing the poetics of rules with the aesthetics of genius, Immanuel Kant obscured a central contribution of Baumgarten's aesthetics, namely the role that Baumgarten's concept of 'perceptio praegnans' played in the formation of Kant's concept of the aesthetic idea. By replacing the poetics of rules with the aesthetics of genius, Kant obscured a central contribution of Baumgarten's aesthetics, namely the role that Baumgarten's concept of 'perceptio praegnans' played in the formation of Kant's concept of the aesthetic idea. For Kant, a genius is characterized by his 'ability to represent aesthetic ideas'. Aesthetic cognition is based — and its connection with sense perception consist precisely in this — on re-presentation.
