  Having published the textbooks for his metaphysics and ethics classes (which Kant would still use decades later), Baumgarten then returned to aesthetics, and began working on a major treatise in 1742. The first volume of his Aesthetica appeared in 1750. It was written in Latin, like Baumgarten’s other works, and was the first work ever to use the name of the new discipline as a title. The next year, however, Baumgarten’s health began to decline, and a second volume of the Aesthetica came out only in 1758, under pressure from the publisher. The two volumes cover just under a third of Baumgarten’s original plan, although they may have included the most original part of the plan. Meanwhile, Meier had been publishing profusely in Halle since the early 1740s, with works in or relevant to aesthetics including a Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions in 1744, a twenty-five part Evaluation of Gottsched’s Poetics collected in book form in 1747, a three-volume Foundations of the Beautiful Sciences from 1748–1750, and a condensation of the latter, the Extract from the Foundations of the Beautiful Arts and Sciences in 1757. (Meier also published massive textbooks in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as a memoir of Baumgarten and a German translation of Baumgarten’s Latin Metaphysics). Although Meier thus published his main treatise in aesthetics before Baumgarten did, he claimed it was based on Baumgarten’s lectures, and always presented himself as a disciple of Baumgarten.