Diotima's Children is the first comprehensive re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics as it prevailed in Germany in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This tradition is of the greatest historical importance because it gave birth to modern aesthetics, art criticism, and art history. This book represents a revolution in the historiography of German aesthetics and philosophy, shaped and canonized since Kant and Hegel. However, its provocative statements are simply the result of carefully rereading the long-dismissed pre-Kantian thinkers and of trying to understand them from the perspective of the questions which originally motivated their thinking. The result is the most informative and comprehensive presentation of German aesthetics and philosophy from Leibniz to Kant available today, one that can finally replace Beck's Kant and his Predecessors.