It wasn't purely aesthetics, though.

This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither deep nor historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the notes of 1820, 1823, 1826, are in many ways the most successful of his efforts.

The question of aesthetics would then be formulated - What is it in things that makes them beautiful, and what is the relation of this aspect of the universe to its ultimate nature, as that is expounded in metaphysics?

Baumgarten did good service in severing aesthetics from the other philosophic disciplines, and in marking out a definite object for its researches.

Fechner's work in aesthetics is also important.