Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto
Author: Alfred Owen Aldridge
Publisher: American Philosophical Society Press
Published: 1951
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.
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Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson
Author: Daniel Carey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-02-02
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 1139447904
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDaniel Carey examines afresh the fundamental debate within the Enlightenment about human diversity. Three central figures - Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson - questioned whether human nature was fragmented by diverse and incommensurable customs and beliefs or unified by shared moral and religious principles. Locke's critique of innate ideas initiated the argument, claiming that no consensus existed in the world about morality or God's existence. Testimony of human difference established this point. His position was disputed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury who reinstated a Stoic account of mankind as inspired by common ethical convictions and an impulse toward the divine. Hutcheson attempted a difficult synthesis of these two opposing figures, respecting Locke's critique while articulating a moral sense that structured human nature. Daniel Carey concludes with an investigation of the relationship between these arguments and contemporary theories, and shows that current conflicting positions reflect long-standing differences that first emerged during the Enlightenment.
Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness
Author: Lawrence E. Klein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1994-02-25
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 0521418062
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe third Earl of Shaftesbury was a pivotal figure in eighteenth-century thought and culture. Professor Klein's study is the first to examine the extensive Shaftesbury manuscripts and offer an interpretation of his diverse writings as an attempt to comprehend contemporary society and politics and, in particular, to offer a legitimation for the new Whig political order established after 1688. As the focus of Shaftesbury's thinking was the idea of politeness, this study involves the first serious examination of the importance of the idea of politeness in the eighteenth century for thinking about society and culture and organising cultural practices. Through politeness, Shaftesbury conceptualised a new kind of public and critical culture for Britain and Europe, and greatly influenced the philosophical and cultural models associated with the European Enlightenment.
Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
Author: Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 536
ISBN-13: 9780521578929
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book, first published in 2000, presents an edition of one of the most important texts of the Enlightenment.
An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, Or Merit
Author: Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 1977
Total Pages: 162
ISBN-13: 9780719006579
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory
Author: Simon Grote
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-10-26
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 1108509118
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBroad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement.
"Be Sober and Reasonable"
Author: Michael Heyd
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2000-09-29
Total Pages: 325
ISBN-13: 9004247173
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBe Sober and Reasonable deals with the theological and medical critique of “enthusiasm” in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and with the relationship between enthusiasm and the new natural philosophy in that period. “Enthusiasm” at that time was a label ascribed to various individuals and groups who claimed to have direct divine inspiration — prophets, millenarists, alchemists, but also experimental philosophers, and even philosophers like Descartes. The book attempts to combine the perspectives of Intellectual history, Church history, history of medicine, and history of science, in analysing the various reactions to enthusiasm. The central thesis of the book is that the reaction to enthusiasm, especially in the Protestant world, may provide one important key to the origins of the Enlightenment, and to the processes of secularization of European consciousness.
Mandeville Studies
Author: I. Primer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 940101633X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor centuries readers have admired the writer who wields his pen like a sword - an Aristophanes, a Rabelais, a Montaigne, a Swift. Using ribaldry, satire and irony in varying proportions, such writers pierce the thick, comfortable hide of society and uncover, predictably, the corruption and hypocrisy that characterize the life of man in commercial society. Though a lesser talent than any of these literary giants, Bernard Mande ville is nevertheless a member of their class. The crucial year in the emergence of his reputation was 1723, the year in which he added his controversial Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools to his Fable of the Bees. From that point on he became one of the most reviled targets of the public guardians of morality and religion; for some he appeared to be truly the Devil incarnate, Mandevil, as Fielding and others spelled it. This reputation was attached to his name well into the nineteenth centu ry. In a diary entry for June 1812 Henry Crabb Robinson recorded the following conversation with the elderly Mrs. Buller: "She received me with a smile, and allowed me to touch her hand. 'What are you reading, Mr. Robinson?' she said. 'The wickedest cleverest book in the English language, if you chance to know it. ' - 'I have known the "Fable of the Bees" more than fifty years. ' She was right in her guess.
The English Deists
Author: Wayne Hudson
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 1317316320
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInterprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists'. This title argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. It contextualizes these writers within the early Enlightenment, which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition.
Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England
Author: Roger D. Lund
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-23
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 1317062973
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.
