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45-525: Mark Goldie , writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , notes that the term "Cambridge Platonists" was given in the 19th century and can be misleading. There is no clear distinction between the group and latitudinarians in general. The categorization and interpretation of the Cambridge Platonists has changed over time. Frances Yates interpreted them as scholars who engaged with

90-538: A Whig , Ashley was not partisan. His poor health forced him to retire from parliament at the dissolution of July 1698. He suffered from asthma . The following year, to escape the London environment, he purchased a property in Little Chelsea , adding a 50-foot extension to the existing building to house his bedchamber and Library, and planting fruit trees and vines. He sold the property to Narcissus Luttrell in 1710. He

135-501: A close latitudinarian follower. Their understanding of reason was as "the candle of the Lord", an echo of the divine within the human soul and an imprint of God within man. They believed that reason could judge the private revelations of Puritan narrative, and investigate contested rituals and liturgy of the Church of England. For this approach they were called "latitudinarian". The dogmatism of

180-477: A concept of "Plastic Nature". Though coming later and not generally considered a Cambridge Platonist himself, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) was much influenced by the movement. Mark Goldie Mark Goldie FRHistS is an English historian and Professor of Intellectual History at Churchill College, Cambridge . He has written on the English political theorist John Locke and

225-662: A dangerous storm during his voyage. He had symptoms of consumption , and gradually became an invalid. He continued to take an interest in politics, both home and foreign, and supported England's participation in the War of the Spanish Succession . The declining state of Shaftesbury's health rendered it necessary for him to seek a warmer climate and in July 1711 he set out for Italy. He settled at Naples in November, and lived there for more than

270-593: A given, but believed it might be available by intermittent divine intervention. In the English sentimental novel of the 18th century, arguments from the Shaftesbury–Hutcheson tradition appear. An early example in Mary Collyer 's Felicia to Charlotte (vol.1, 1744) comes from its hero Lucius, who reasons in line with An Enquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit on the "moral sense". The second volume (1749) has discussions of conduct book material, and makes use of

315-491: A number of other key figures, can be traced back at least to the 1730s in continental Europe, and still earlier in English texts." The Cambridge Platonists used the framework of the philosophia perennis of Agostino Steuco , and from it argued for moderation. They believed that reason is the proper judge of disagreements, and so they advocated dialogue between the Puritan and Laudian traditions. The orthodox English Calvinists of

360-443: A social creature, Shaftesbury argued that the egoist and the extreme altruist are both imperfect. People, to contribute to the happiness of the whole, must fit in. He rejected the idea that humankind is naturally selfish; and the idea that altruism necessarily cuts across self-interest. Thomas Jefferson found this general and social approach attractive. This move relied on a close parallel between moral and aesthetic criteria. In

405-405: A work from 1699. With this treatise, Shaftesbury became the founder of moral sense theory . It is accompanied by The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody , from 1709. Shaftesbury himself regarded it as the most ambitious of his treatises. The main object of The Moralists is to propound a system of natural theology , for theodicy . Shaftesbury believed in one God whose characteristic attribute

450-573: A year. Shaftesbury died at Chiaia in the Kingdom of Naples , on 15 February 1713 (N.S.) His body was brought back to England and buried at Wimborne St Giles , the family seat in Dorset. John Toland was an early associate, but Shaftesbury after some time found him a troublesome ally. Toland published a draft of the Inquiry concerning Virtue , without permission. Shaftesbury may have exaggerated its faults, but

495-604: Is A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm , advocating religious toleration , published anonymously in 1708. It was based on a letter sent to John Somers, 1st Baron Somers of September 1707. At this time repression of the French Camisards was topical. The second treatise is Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour , first published in 1709. The third part is Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author , from 1710. It opens with Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit , based on

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540-660: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (26 February 1671 – 16 February 1713) was an English peer, Whig politician, philosopher and writer. He was born at Exeter House in London, the son and first child of the future Anthony Ashley Cooper, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife Lady Dorothy Manners , daughter of John Manners, 8th Earl of Rutland . Letters sent to his parents reveal emotional manipulation attempted by his mother in refusing to see her son unless he cut off all ties to his sickly and secluded father. At

585-706: Is a member of the Early Modern History and Political Thought and Intellectual History subject groups at the Faculty of History in Cambridge. He was educated at the University of Sussex and obtained his PhD from Cambridge . In 1979 he was appointed college lecturer and a university lecturer in 1993. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society . This article about an English historian or genealogist

630-541: Is to be found in Locke. The conceptual framework used by Shaftesbury was representative of much thinking in the early Enlightenment , and remained popular until the 1770s. When the Characteristicks appeared they were welcomed by Le Clerc and Gottfried Leibniz . Among the English deists Shaftesbury was significant, plausible and the most respectable. In terms of Augustan literature , Shaftesbury's defence of ridicule

675-517: Is universal benevolence; in the moral government of the universe; and in a future state of man making up for the present life. Entitled Miscellaneous Reflections , this consisted of previously unpublished works. From his stay at Naples there was A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules . Shaftesbury as a moralist opposed Thomas Hobbes . He was a follower of

720-695: The Dunciad (IV.487–490): "Or that bright Image to our Fancy draw, Which Theocles in raptur'd vision saw, While thro' Poetic scenes the Genius roves, Or wanders wild in Academic Groves". In notes to these lines, Pope directed the reader to various passages in Shaftesbury's work. Shaftesbury's ethical system was rationalised by Francis Hutcheson , and from him passed with modifications to David Hume ; these writers, however, changed from reliance on moral sense to

765-537: The Cambridge Platonists , and like them rejected the way Hobbes collapsed moral issues into expediency. His first published work was an anonymous Preface to the sermons of Benjamin Whichcote , a prominent Cambridge Platonist, published in 1698. In it he belaboured Hobbes and his ethical egoism , but also the commonplace carrot and stick arguments of Christian moralists. While Shaftesbury conformed in public to

810-602: The Christian Kabbalah but rejected Hermeticism following Isaac Casaubon 's redating of the Hermetic corpus. She argues that Cudworth and More perpetuate certain Renaissance Neoplatonic ideas , including a broad syncretism of early forms of Hermeticism, in a new scholarly context. Dmitri Levitin has challenged any categorization of the Cambridge Platonists as a cohesive philosophical group. While he admits that

855-577: The Church of England , his private view of some of its doctrines was less respectful. His starting point in the Characteristicks , however, was indeed such a form of ethical naturalism as was common ground for Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville and Spinoza : appeal to self-interest. He divided moralists into Stoics and Epicurean , identifying with the Stoics and their attention to the common good . It made him concentrate on virtue . He took Spinoza and Descartes as

900-574: The Glorious Revolution , Lord Ashley returned to England in 1689. It took five years, but he entered public life, as a parliamentary candidate for the borough of Poole , and was returned on 21 May 1695. He spoke for the Bill for Regulating Trials in Cases of Treason, one provision of which was that a person indicted for treason or misprision of treason should be allowed the assistance of counsel. Although

945-674: The November 1701 English general election . After the first few weeks of Anne 's reign, Shaftesbury, who had been deprived of the vice-admiralty of Dorset , returned to private life. In August 1703, he again settled in the Netherlands . At Rotterdam he lived, he says in a letter to his steward Wheelock, at the rate of less than £200 a year, and yet had much to dispose of and spend beyond convenient living. Shaftesbury returned to England in August 1704, he landed at Aldeburgh , Suffolk having escaped

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990-534: The Philemon to Hydaspes (1737) of Henry Coventry , described by Aldridge as "filled with favorable references to Shaftesbury." The eponymous hero of The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) by Samuel Richardson has been described as embodying the "Shaftesburian model" of masculinity : he is "stoic, rational, in control, yet sympathetic towards others, particularly those less fortunate." A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) by Laurence Sterne

1035-504: The deontological ethics of moral obligation. From there it was taken up by Adam Smith , who elaborated a theory of moral judgement with some restricted emotional input, and a complex apparatus taking context into account. Joseph Butler adopted the system, but not ruling out the place of " moral reason ", a rationalist version of the affective moral sense. Samuel Johnson , the American educator, did not accept Shaftesbury's moral sense as

1080-525: The "inward form" concept, key for education in the approach of German classical philosophy . Later philosophical writers in German ( Gideon Spicker with Die Philosophie des Grafen von Shaftesbury , 1872, and Georg von Gizycki with Die Philosophie Shaftesbury's , 1876) returned to Shaftesbury in books. At the beginning of the 18th century, Shaftesbury built a folly on the Shaftesbury Estate, known as

1125-453: The 1712 edition of Characteristicks , the modern scholarly consensus is that the uses of his views on it as a "test of truth" were a stretch. According to Alfred Owen Aldridge , the "test of truth" phrase is not to be found in Characteristicks ; it was imposed on the Augustan debate by George Berkeley . The influence of Shaftesbury, and in particular The Moralists , on An Essay on Man ,

1170-560: The Cambridge Platonists as a cohesive group in terms of philosophical views as historically unfounded. More recently, David Leech has argued that while Levitin makes some important points "it would be a mistake to assume that the category of Cambridge Platonism is a retroprojection of nineteenth century historiography. This is because earlier practices of referring to a group of primarily Cambridge-based 'Platonists', invariably including Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Henry More (1614–1687), usually Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), and (more variably)

1215-419: The Cambridge Platonists, religion and reason were in harmony, and reality was known not by physical sensation alone, but by intuition of the intelligible forms that exist behind the material world of everyday perception. Universal, ideal forms inform matter, and the physical senses are unreliable guides to their reality. In response to the mechanical philosophy , More proposed a "Hylarchic Principle", and Cudworth

1260-430: The English tradition, this appeal to a moral sense was innovative. Primarily emotional and non-reflective, it becomes rationalised by education and use. Corollaries are that morality stands apart from theology, and the moral qualities of actions are determined apart from the will of God ; and that the moralist is not concerned to solve the problems of free will and determinism . Shaftesbury in this way opposed also what

1305-625: The Netherlands in the late 1690s, he got to know Locke's contact Benjamin Furly . Through Furly he had introductions to become acquainted with Pierre Bayle , Jean Leclerc and Philipp van Limborch . Bayle introduced him to Pierre Des Maizeaux . Letters from Shaftesbury to Benjamin Furly, his two sons, and his clerk Harry Wilkinson, were included in a volume entitled Original Letters of Locke, Sidney and Shaftesbury , published by Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster (1830, and in enlarged form, 1847). Shaftesbury

1350-662: The Philosopher's Tower. It sits in a field, visible from the B3078 just south of Cranborne . In the Shaftesbury papers that went to the Public Record Office are several memoranda, letters, rough drafts, etc. A portrait of the 3rd Earl is displayed in Shaftesbury Town Hall . Shaftesbury married in 1709 Jane Ewer, the daughter of Thomas Ewer of Bushey Hall , Hertfordshire . On 9 February 1711, their only child Anthony,

1395-505: The Puritan divines, with their anti-rationalist demands, was, they felt, incorrect. They also felt that the Calvinist insistence on individual revelation left God uninvolved with the majority of mankind. At the same time, they were reacting against the reductive materialist writings of Thomas Hobbes. They felt that the latter, while rationalist, were denying the idealistic part of the universe. To

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1440-469: The age of three Ashley-Cooper was made over to the formal guardianship of his grandfather Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury . John Locke , as medical attendant to the Ashley household, was entrusted with the supervision of his education. It was conducted according to the principles of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and the method of teaching Latin and Greek conversationally

1485-448: The continuance [...] of it too long, is able to bring irrecoverable ruin and misery". This version of a golden mean doctrine that goes back to Aristotle was savaged by Mandeville, who slurred it as associated with a sheltered and comfortable life, Catholic asceticism , and modern sentimental rusticity. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards adopted Shaftesbury's view that "all excellency is harmony, symmetry or proportion". On man as

1530-765: The group "existed as a loose set of acquaintances linked by tutorial relationships ," he argues that they were not exclusive in their interest in Platonism, nor did most of them believe in any syncretism or a prisca theologia / philosophia perennis . Levitin notes that of the Cambridge Platonists, only More saw himself as a philosopher rather than a philologist or theologian and he faced criticism from others, including Cudworth, for his lack of attention to historical detail. Moreover, philosophers not traditionally deemed "Cambridge Platonists" took an historical and philosophical interest in Platonism and ideas of ancient science. Based on these conclusions Levitin rejects any categorization of

1575-402: The leading Epicureans of his time (in unpublished writings). Shaftesbury examined man first as a unit in himself, and secondly socially. His major principle was harmony or balance, rather than rationalism . In man, he wrote, "Whoever is in the least versed in this moral kind of architecture will find the inward fabric so adjusted, [...] that the barely extending of a single passion too far or

1620-525: The relationship cooled. Toland edited 14 letters from Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth , published in Toland in 1721. Molesworth had been a good friend from the 1690s. Other friends among English Whigs were Charles Davenant , Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun , Walter Moyle , William Stephens and John Trenchard . From Locke's circle in England, Shaftesbury knew Edward Clarke , Damaris Masham and Walter Yonge . In

1665-405: The time found in their views an insidious attack, by-passing as it did the basic theological issues of atonement and justification by faith . Given the circle's Cambridge background in Puritan colleges such as Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Emmanuel College, Cambridge , the undermining was intellectually all the more effective. John Bunyan complained in those terms about Edward Fowler ,

1710-654: Was Lord Proprietor of the English colony of Carolina in North America and the Bahamas during this time. Lord Ashley moved to the Netherlands . Away for over a year, Ashley returned to England, and shortly succeeded his father as Earl of Shaftesbury . He took an active part, on the Whig side in the House of Lords , in the January 1701 English general election , and again, with more success, in

1755-602: Was a patron of Michael Ainsworth, a young Dorset man of Wimborne St Giles , maintained by Shaftesbury at University College, Oxford . The Letters to a Young Man at the University (1716) were addressed to Ainsworth. Others he supported included Pierre Coste and Paul Crellius . Most of the works for which Shaftesbury is known were completed in the period 1705 to 1710. He collected a number of those and other works in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (first edition 1711, anonymous, 3 vols.). His philosophical work

1800-404: Was claimed in the 18th century by Voltaire (in his philosophical letter "On Pope"), Lord Hervey and Thomas Warton , and supported in recent times, for example by Maynard Mack . Alexander Pope did not mention Shaftesbury explicitly as a source: this omission has been understood in terms of the political divide, Pope being a Tory. Pope references the character Theocles from The Moralists in

1845-454: Was intended by its author to evoke the "sympathizing principle" on which the tradition founded by latitudinarians , Cambridge Platonists and Shaftesbury relied. In 1745 Denis Diderot adapted or reproduced the Inquiry concerning Virtue in what was afterwards known as his Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu . In 1769 a French translation of the whole of Shaftesbury's works, including the Letters ,

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1890-425: Was limited to ethics, religion, and aesthetics where he highlighted the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality. Basil Willey wrote "[...] his writings, though suave and polished, lack distinction of style [...]". This listing refers to the first edition. The later editions saw changes. The Letter on Design was first published in the edition of the Characteristicks issued in 1732. The opening piece

1935-723: Was published at Geneva. Translations of separate treatises into German began to be made in 1738, and in 1776–1779 there appeared a complete German translation of the Characteristicks . Hermann Theodor Hettner stated that not only Leibniz, Voltaire and Diderot, but Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Moses Mendelssohn , Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Gottfried von Herder , drew from Shaftesbury. Herder in early work took from Shaftesbury arguments for respecting individuality, and against system and universal psychology. He went on to praise him in Adrastea . Wilhelm von Humboldt found in Shaftesbury

1980-492: Was pursued by his instructress, Elizabeth Birch. At the age of eleven, it is said, Ashley could read both languages with ease. Birch had moved to Clapham and Ashley spent some years there with her. In 1683, after the death of the first Earl, his father sent Lord Ashley, as he now was by courtesy, to Winchester College . Under a Scottish tutor, Daniel Denoune, he began a continental tour with two older companions, Sir John Cropley, 2nd Baronet , and Thomas Sclater Bacon . After

2025-488: Was taken as an entitlement to scoff, and to use ridicule as a "test of truth". Clerical authors operated on the assumption that he was a freethinker . Ezra Stiles , reading Characteristicks in 1748 without realising Shaftesbury had been marked down as a deist , was both impressed and sometimes shocked. Around this time John Leland and Philip Skelton stepped up a campaign against deist influence, tarnishing Shaftesbury's reputation. While Shaftesbury wrote on ridicule in

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