  No single person deserves to be credited as the inventor of modern aesthetics. Several figures in the early eighteenth century independently made contributions to criticism and philosophy that would become modern aesthetics. In England, Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711) and Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1712) laid some of the groundwork for aesthetics. On the Continent, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz’s Traité de beau (1715) and Christian Wolff’s Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man (1720) were pioneering contributions to aesthetics. All of these works appeared in the second decade of the eighteenth century, as did Du Bos’s Critical Reflections.  Du Bos deserves to be recognized as among the originators of modern aesthetics and philosophy of art. His importance was widely recognized in the eighteenth century. Johann Georg Sulzer, in his General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771–74) described Du Bos as “the first of modern critics to construct a theory of art upon general principles” (Baker and Christensen 1995, 25).