Earl Of Shaftesbury Research Articles

Moral Perfection and Freedom in the Philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Moral Perfection and Freedom in the Philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Obscure Judiciousness: Revising Reason and Judgment in Burke's Enquiry

Abstract: This essay argues for a reevaluation of the importance of reason and judgement in Edmund Burke's aesthetic theory outlined in the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759). Situating Burke's aesthetic theory alongside those of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury; Francis Hutcheson; David Hume; and Immanuel Kant, it presents Burke's theory of judgement as a crucial component, one which attempts to hold together the descriptive and normative dimensions of the text. The main point of the analysis is to identify the emergence of a prominent legislative dimension to Burke's account of judgement in his revised "Introduction on Taste." This expanded role for reason and judgement complicates the apparent decoupling of reason and sensation that characterizes many of the Enquiry's most famous descriptions of aesthetic experience, demonstrating how the subsequent reincorporation of these experiences into social discursive practices requires a careful adjudication of where the respective limits of sense, imagination, and reason are to be located creating a far more complex philosophical dynamic within the text as a whole. In tracing the emergence of this rationally legislative dimension in the revised account of taste, this interpretation seeks to highlight several significant philosophical parallels between Burke and Kant's aesthetic philosophies, something which is often overlooked by the two being set in an overly contrastive intellectual relationship.

Shaftesbury's Stoic Impoliteness in the Soliloquy and Askêmata

Abstract: Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, is widely understood as a philosopher of politeness. This essay shows the constructive role that impolite writing plays in his Characteristics (1711). Shaftesbury is impolite in two ways: he engages in inappropriate public soliloquy, and he uses vivid medical imagery of vomit and other bodily fluids. These two kinds of impolite speech are connected, and both point back to the private program of rigorous stoic exercises, the Askêmata , that Shaftesbury undertook in the years leading up to the publication of the Characteristics. Shaftesbury exploits the existence of these notebooks to practice a benevolent philosophical deception on contemporary readers, pretending to reveal secrets about himself that in fact remain hidden and demonstrating his indifference to reputation by risking rebuke from readers. But his impolite metaphors of bodily fluids function as waste in the critic Sophie Gee's sense of a remainder left over after something has been made. As such, they function as a textual trace of Shaftesbury's own philosophical process.

New Chapters in the Evolution of Taste: How Eighteenth-Century English Salonnières Shaped the Culture of Sociability

Abstract In eighteenth-century Britain the term taste was a new vehicle for discerning subtle qualities of an individual mind’s experience of practically anything in the polite world and the world of letters. The term entailed the response of the mind to beauty, and it became popular in each and every genre of writing. The notion of taste acquired a distinctive dimension which effectively disentangles it from the notion of aesthetics emerging early in the nineteenth century as a new area of philosophical enquiry. The eighteenth-century discourses on and ongoing debates over taste and beauty focused on the dominant classicist prototypes of universality, awareness of proportion, harmony and the sense of form and symmetry, principles which were specifically articulated by such Men of Taste as the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume and Joshua Reynolds, who had a monopoly on taste. However, the eighteenth century laid the groundwork for an alternative notion of taste, which included women in the realm of theorizing in the taste mode. This article aims to look into the category of exotic taste, and more precisely into the fashionable literary coterie of eighteenth-century England, often presided by women writers such as the Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, Catherine Macaulay, and Hannah More, with the purpose of connecting this type of literary promotion, which was effective in shaping contemporary literary taste, to the theories of taste that anticipated aesthetic judgment in the nineteenth century. Besides, the new social milieu accommodating literary meetings shaped a new discourse which, though ridiculed, facilitated and revitalized conversation in what Hume called “the conversable world” and Samuel Johnson defined as the “clubbable” age. Accordingly, the article will explore the extent to which the discourse employed in such conversations transformed women’s literary taste into an accepted critical category and contributed to the formation of literary reputations.

Shaftesbury, Third Earl of [Anthony Ashley Cooper

Shaftesbury, Third Earl of [Anthony Ashley Cooper

The First Earl of Shaftesbury's Resolute Conscience and Aristocratic Constitutionalism

AbstractThis article provides a reappraisal of the first earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83) and challenges his reputation as an unprincipled politician. Conversely, it is argued that Shaftesbury's opposition to both Cromwell during the Protectorate and Charles II in the Restoration was guided by a resolute ‘conscience’. While there was certainly elasticity in his conduct, Shaftesbury was very much the product of a political education framed during the Civil War and Commonwealth eras. The article explicitly demonstrates through an exposition of his activity and thought in the 1650s and 1670s that four guiding values remained consistent in his career. Both periods were shaped by concerns over political and religious tyranny by an overbearing executive and a threat to ‘lives, liberty, and property’ from the ruler, the church, and the army. Shaftesbury's significance lies in the aristocratic constitutionalism he believed offered a restraint to encroachment by the executive and the people in government. Relying upon long-established traditions that positioned the nobility as an independent bridle against arbitrary government, Shaftesbury suggested a forward-thinking vision of elite rule supported by the people. In clarifying Shaftesbury's values, the article rejects interpretations of him as a republican, Neo-Harringtonian, or a believer in popular government (democracy).

“It’s all the Same What I Eat”: Jane Austen’s Dietary Philosophy

Jane Austen’s novels invite various studies from different disciplines, and the eating motif catches critical attention. Furthermore, while cultural study reconstructs eighteenth-century recipes and dining habits, it also reminds readers that the consumption of food in Austen’s novels has literary and philosophical significance. This study examines Austen’s food allusions and eating passages in her novels, and it finds that from Juvenilia (1787-1793) to Persuasion (1818) Austen gradually develops her dietary philosophy on eating by giving food and food consumption ethical values, arguing that Austen’s treatment of eating and food in her novels corresponds to eighteenth-century philosophical ideas towards eating. The first part of the study focuses on eating and morality. The study examines eighteenthcentury English philosophical ideas about eating from John Locke (1632-1704), Anthony Ashley Cooper The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), and David Hume (1711-1776), and it reviews recent studies on Austen’s food plots, emphasizing the importance of food imagery and allusions in the novels. The second part examines Austen’s food jokes in her juvenile writing, finding that in these earlier works she satirizes irrational dietary habits such as excessive eating and drinking. The final part of the study examines food passages and food consumers in her mature, complete novels. Here the suggestion is made that in Austen’s long novels food is given symbolic meaning and that moral significance is attributed to eating manners and food preferences. An analysis of food imagery and consumption in Austen’s works reveals that her preference for plain and modest food corresponds to the teaching of philosophers and moralists of her time and highlights the novelist’s preference for moral and decent characters.

Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society

Karl Axelsson’s new book belongs to that stream of recent publications which strive to re-interpret and re-evaluate the pre-Kantian period of modern aesthetics. It also challenges and criticizes those, mostly Kantian, conceptions and teleological schemes of interpretation which have been elaborated in Alfred Baeumler’s and Ernst Cassirer’s seminal books of the 1920s and 1930s and applied even in the most recent modern history by Paul Guyer. Axelsson concentrates on two early eighteenth-century British authors of utmost importance, Joseph Addison and The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who were contemporaries but, to my knowledge, never mentioned each other in their published writings. To various extent, both have been widely acknowledged as crucial figures of the nascent field of aesthetics, thus one can find the innovation of Axelsson’s enterprise not in the selection, but in his effort to re-consider their achievements under the catch phrase ‘political aesthetics’. His interpretative approach draws on Lawrence...

Shaftesbury on the Beauty of Nature

Many people today glorify wild nature. This attitude is diametrically opposed to the denigration of wild nature that was common in the seventeenth century. One of the most significant initiators of the modern revaluation of nature was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). I elucidate here Shaftesbury’s pivotal view of nature. I show how that view emerged as Shaftesbury’s solution to a problem he took to be of the deepest philosophical and personal importance: the problem of how worship of God can be both transportingly emotional and entirely rational. In section 1 I sketch the denigration of wild nature in two of Shaftesbury’s predecessors: Burnet and Locke. I next turn to Shaftesbury’s problem, describing in section 2 the love of God he aspired to and in section 3 his commitment to rational religion. I then explain Shaftesbury’s solution, describing in section 4 his view of beauty in general and in section 5 his view of the beauty of nature.

Bernard Mandeville on the Use and Abuse of Hypocrisy

In The Fable of the Bees, Bernard Mandeville declared that ‘it is impossible we could be sociable Creatures without Hypocrisy’. Mandeville set out his ideas of sociability against Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose notions of virtue he dismissed as ‘a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy’. The main goal of this article is to reconstruct Mandeville’s account of hypocrisy, first by explaining why he accords it such a prominent role in understanding our moral and social norms, and, second, by piecing together his criticisms of Shaftesbury’s rival ethical theory. In doing so, the article outlines a more general Mandevillean framework for assessing when hypocrisy is likely to prove either socially beneficial or pernicious, while also examining what is at stake in choosing to expose rather than tolerate other people’s hypocrisy.

“Pure Joy”: Spinoza on Laughter and Cheerfulness

AbstractLaughter is a significant topic for Renaissance and seventeenth‐century philosophers. Still, the latter rarely approved of laughter but endorsed it as useful mockery for theological or philosophical purposes. Benedict Spinoza’s view of laughter stands out as an exception to this attitude as well as to previous and later ones. Spinoza differentiates between mockery and laughter, denounces the former as evil, and characterizes the latter as “pure joy”: laughter is about oneself rather than another and originates in noticing something good, rather than base or ugly. In contrast to melancholy, cheerfulness is “always good” and is a precondition of our liberation as it furthers the use of reason. Not only is Spinoza’s view original, but it is an important source of the eighteenth‐century notions of good‐natured laughter and good humor through a more than probable influence on their proponent, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Whilst Spinoza’s view of cheerfulness is briefly addressed in recent studies, his view of laughter goes unnoticed in most commentaries and is misrepresented in humor studies. Contrary to what is assumed in the philosophy of laughter, I argue that the most important defense of laughter comes not from a British Enlightenment thinker, but from the Dutch Jewish seventeenth‐century philosopher.

Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetics of St John Henry Newman by Guy NichollsCong. Orat., Gracewing, Leominster, 2019, pp. xxiv + 352, £25.00, hbk

Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetics of St John Henry Newman by Guy NichollsCong. Orat., Gracewing, Leominster, 2019, pp. xxiv + 352, £25.00, hbk

List-Making as a Spiritual Exercise: On the Functions of Enumeration in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Askêmata

“What is Life else but a Dream? Apparitions, Vision, Fancy.”1 In the philosophical journal of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, life thus defined is recorded in strange, incoherent ...

“The moral arithmetic”: morality in the age of mathematics

ABSTRACT This article examines the influence of mathematics on early modern and modern moral thought. In particular, I trace the origin and development of the “moral arithmetic” (which has previously been misattributed); that is, the attempt to introduce quantificatory calculation to morality. Tracing the origins and development of both the term and the idea, I show that it was coined by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury in the seventeenth century, and that it contributed to the rise of rationalistic, utilitarian Benthamite thought in the nineteenth century, laying the foundations for the modern discipline of mathematical economics. In particular, I emphasize that, while today we habitually associate ideas of self-interest with “cold, hard” mathematical analyses, the original application of mathematics to moral thought began among the theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to combat ideas of self-interest. I conclude by reflecting on some of the problems with the scope and limits of the history of political thought, and argue for the importance of drawing intellectual history and the history of science, in particular the history of mathematics, closer together.

New Perspectives on Agency in Early Modern Philosophy

ABSTRACTThis introductory article outlines the themes and aims of this special issue, which offers new perspectives on early modern debates about agency in two ways: First, it recovers writings on agency and liberty that have been widely neglected or that have received insufficient attention, including writings by Anne Conway, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, William King, Gabrielle Suchon, Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, Mary Astell, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Second, it reveals the richness of early modern debates about agency and liberty.

On Genius: The Development of a Philosophical Concept of Genius in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

This paper examines the emergence of a philosophical concept of genius based on imagination, association, and the Lockean theory of ideas, primarily in eighteenth-century Britain. It considers the background, including the work of the Abbé Jean Baptiste Du Bos, the third earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume, but it focuses specifically on the British writers William Duff, William Sharpe, and Alexander Gerard. It does not deal with the later Kantian and post-Kantian Romantic theories of genius.

Afterword: Writing Religion and the Genealogy of the Literary Aesthetic

AbstractThis afterword takes as its starting‐point the suggestion that the category of the ‘literary’ might be implicated within a historical process of secularisation. This possibility is resisted, at least in respect of its applicability to the influential circle of eighteenth‐century clerical literati associated with Bishop William Warburton, who ranged themselves against the growing influence of the third earl of Shaftesbury and his followers, for reasons that could be construed as at once matters of orthodoxy and questions of taste. In doing so, they helped to form ‘pre‐Romantic’ cultural prejudices while simultaneously defending the interests of the eighteenth‐century Church.

RIDICULE, CENSORSHIP, AND THE REGULATION OF PUBLIC SPEECH: THE CASE OF SHAFTESBURY

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710Soliloquy, or Advice to an Authoragainst the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.

How Shaftesbury Read Marcus Aurelius: Two 'Curious and Interesting' Volumes with His Manuscript Annotations

When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Roman emperor was a relatively new member of the Stoic tradition as it was seen through early modern eyes. This article discusses two books owned and annotated by Shaftesbury, one a translation of Marcus Aurelius into English, the other a version of the Greek text. These books are a record of his study of earlier scholarship on the Meditations, primarly the edition and notes of Thomas Gataker. This article gives a sense of how a reader who was influential in the dissemination of Stoic thought, studied the scholarship of an earlier age.

A ‘Shaftesburian Agenda’? Lord Burlington, Lord Shaftesbury and the Intellectual Origins of English Palladianism

AbstractIn this article we argue against the widely held view that Lord Burlington's love for architecture was inspired by the writings of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, particularly his Letter Concerning Design. First, we seek to demonstrate that Burlington could not have been familiar with, or even aware of, Shaftesbury's Letter until long after the development of his interest in architecture. Secondly, we argue that Shaftesbury's true architectural heirs advanced an agenda that was distinct from, and even hostile to, Burlingtonian Palladianism; and that the supposed link between the Letter and Burlington has served to distract historians from this. We suggest, thirdly, that the importance assigned to the Letter by architectural historians has derived from a longstanding and hugely influential interpretation of the rise of Burlingtonian Palladianism, an interpretation undermined by much recent work by revisionist architectural historians but still prevalent. Finally, having argued against the link between Shaftesbury and Burlington, we posit an alternative source for Burlingtonian Palladianism.