  Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (b. 1670, d. 1742) was a French antiquarian, historian, diplomat, polymath, and aesthetician. He participated in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, wrote on numismatics, delved into a variety of historical questions, and had an enduring love of the fine arts. Today he is primarily known as the author of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (1719) and as one of the founders of modern aesthetics. Deeply influenced by his friend John Locke, Du Bos made a major contribution to the spread of empiricism in France, both in aesthetics and other areas of philosophy. He influenced almost all eighteenth-century contributors to aesthetics, including Charles Batteux, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, David Hume, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.