The composite term “autonomy aesthetics” combines what was originally a political term, autonomy (“self-determination”; “with its own laws”), also used juridically since the 17th century and elevated only in the Enlightenment, by Kant, to the status of a key philosophical concept, with A.G. Baumgarten’s (1735/50) neologism for the study of sensory knowledge, aesthetics.
Autonomy aesthetics is inherently concerned with two things, first the hist…