The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master’s thesis to mean epistêmê aisthetikê , or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes §CXVI, pp. 86–7). But Baumgarten’s denomination of the field was an adult baptism: without a name, aesthetics had been part of philosophy since Plato attacked the educational value of poetry in the Republic and Aristotle briefly defended it in his fragmentary Poetics . In particular, Aristotle defended poetry from Plato’s charge that it is cognitively useless by arguing that poetry delivers universal truths in a readily graspable form, unlike, for example, history, which deals merely with particular facts (Aristotle, Poetics , chapter 9, 1451a37–1451b10). And if experience of poetry can reveal important moral truths, then it can also be important to the development of morality, the other pole of Plato’s doubts.…