<history of philosophy, biography> English moral essayist (1671-1713). Raised in genteel circumstances by his grandfather, one of the Lords Proprietor of the Carolina colonies and a close associate of Locke, Shaftesbury proposed a set of practical rules for living that he claimed to arise from the natural dispositions of all human beings, without any reliance on divine revelation in An Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit (1699). This was an important step in the development of the notion of a moral sense by Hutcheson and Hume. Shaftesbury's works were collected in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711). Recommended Reading: The Shaftesbury Collection (Thoemmes, 1997); John L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, Lord Shaftesbury (Ayer, 1970); Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994); and John Andrew Bernstein, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant: An Introduction to the Conflict Between Aesthetic and Moral Values in Modern (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1980).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
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