  Sulzer was born in Winthertur, Switzerland, in 1720. Destined for the clergy, at sixteen he was boarded with a pastor in Zürich and attended the gymnasium there. But at eighteen, he became more interested in the study of mathematics, botany, and philosophy, and came under the influence of Bodmer and Breitinger. Sulzer was ordained on the completion of his studies in 1739, and in 1740 became a tutor in a wealthy Zürich household. The next year he became a village vicar and was able to devote himself to natural history and archaeology. In 1744 he took up a teaching position in Magdeburg, Germany, and in 1747 he became professor of mathematics at a gymnasium in Berlin. Sulzer was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1750. From that time on he regularly published essays on reason, consciousness, language, materialism, the immortality of the soul, and the nature and existence of God, as well as a lengthy “Investigation of the original of agreeable and disagreeable sentiments” (1751), which first stated central themes of his aesthetics. He also published shorter treatments of such topics as genius (1757), the utility of drama, a reply to Rousseau’s attack upon the theater (1760), and “Energy in works of fine art” (1765). In 1755 Sulzer published a translation of Hume’s first Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, and Hume’s theories of the imagination and the moral sentiments, although not his skepticism, would considerably influence the further development of Sulzer’s own philosophy. Although Sulzer himself remained at bottom a loyal Leibnizo-Wolffian, his introduction of Hume into German philosophical discourse prepared the way for Kant’s critique of that philosophy. In 1761, Sulzer began work on his General Theory of the Fine Arts, which was originally planned as a revision of Jacques Lacombe’s Dictionnaire portraitif des beaux-arts (1752) but became a vehicle for the statement of Sulzer’s own general views about aesthetics and the moral significance of art as well an outlet for his vast learning and energy. Sulzer finally published the General Theory in two volumes from 1771 to 1774; especially in the expanded posthumous editions by Friedrich von Blankenburg in 1786–87 and 1792–94 (Sulzer having died in 1779), this remains a valuable source for the aesthetics of the German Enlightenment and especially for its bibliography.