"Regarding the beautiful sciences, either something very good or nothing at all should be written," explained Karl Philipp Moritz in 1785. Indeed, he succeeded in achieving something special in the field of art reflection: even before Kant and Schiller, he established the autonomy of aesthetics, i.e., the idea that beauty is "a self-contained" whole. His major programmatic work, "On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful" (1788), was received by Goethe and Schiller and forms the foundation of Weimar Classicism. The present volume presents Moritz's most important writings on aesthetics, well-commented and accompanied by a detailed afterword.