<i>Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury . Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, ed. Wolfram Benda et al.Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holz-boog, 2008. £ 318. So far ten volumes of the Standard Editionof the Shaftesbury Project based at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg have appeared. When finished, it will comprise the writings published by Shaftesbury during his own lifetime (including any early versions of the treatises later joined to form Characteristicks) and of manuscript drafts for planned works (for instance Plasticks, published in volume I, 5, Aestheticsin 2001). For the first time Shaftesbury's correspondence will also be covered in its entirety. Complete and meticulously edited, the Standard Editionis unique and will stimulate Shaftesbury scholarship. The Standard Editionis designed to illustrate [End Page 80]how far the earl subjected himself in private and, as an author, in public to the "study, pains, or application," the " limae labor" ( Miscellaneous ReflectionsV, 1). The planned Chartae Socraticae, a book conceived as a companion to the virtue and philosophy of the ancients, bears this out. It would have taken the form of a critical edition offering those Greek texts which, in Shaftesbury's opinion, most faithfully preserve for us the life and thought of the historical Socrates (particularly Xenophon's Memorabiliaand Apology). The clearly programmatic Chartae Socraticae(the present edition is the first to date) were designed to present Socrates as "the divinest Man that had appear'd ever in the Heathen World," as someone for whom philosophy was quite rightly "a matter of Practice" and who was able to maintain virtue and morality in every situation. This approach, implying a fundamental concord between the Christian religion and secular philosophy on a moral plane, pervades Shaftesbury's writings and is noticeable as early as his preface to his edition (1698) of Benjamin Whichcote's Select Sermons(see vol. II, 4 of the Standard Edition). The present volume, exemplary in its careful and detailed editing, shows that Chartae Socraticae, in spite of having survived as a fragment, is at the core of Shaftesbury's thinking and affected many parts of his work. Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock University of Göttingen Copyright © 2011 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo