Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (February 26, 1671 – February 4, 1713), was an English politician, philosopher and writer.
Biography
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Early of Shaftesbury, was born in 1671. His grandfather (the 1st Earl) had supported Cromwell and, later, the Whig party. Shaftesbury was primarily raised by his grandfather, and would later become a member of the Whig party during his own political career.
The 1st Earl employed John Locke, who acted as a physician in the Cooper household, to educate his grandson. Shaftesbury was greatly influenced by Locke, and later made a trip to Locke during his exhile in Holland. Yet this influence was not not always in the form of acceptance of ideas - indeed, Shaftesbury saw much of his philosophy as aimed against Locke's. For in his education, Shaftesbury was swayed by the examples of ancient stoicism and Platonic rationalism, which were often at odds with Locke's variety of egoism and empiricism.
Asthma (worsened by London's smog) forced Shaftesbury to end his political career at the age of 30, which marked the starting point of his philosophically most significant decade. Beginning with the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit of 1699, Shaftesbury published a series of works in a variety of styles, chiefly focusing on ethics, aesthetics, politics and theology. In 1711, he collected those works into a single volume entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Two years later, his respiratory problems overcame came him. After his death, two further volumes of his work were published.
Shaftesbury's work was highly influential throughout the 18th century, helping shape the ethical thought of figures as central as Hume and Kant.
Philosophy
Shaftesbury's philosophy stems from a surprising variety of sources: Plato, the stoics, the Cambridge Platonists, and John Locke. In many ways more a rationalist than an empiricist, Shaftesbury is nevertheless marked as one of the founders of the (typically empiricist) view that our moral concepts and judgments are based on sentiment and feeling, as opposed to reason and rational intuition. While therefore being an innovative thinker, his overarching view of the universe, with its focus on harmony and insistence on the human-independence of beauty and goodness, harkens back to the vision laid out over two millenia earlier in Plato's Republic.
The Harmonious Universe
While Shaftesbury's chief object of inquiry, following Locke, is the nature of humans and the human mind, he insists that humans can only be understood with respect to their role in the larger systems of which they are a part. To reinforce this, he asks his readers to consider how well someone would fare in understanding the nature of a watch if he were unaware of its role as an instrument to measure time.
Shaftesbury saw the universe as a harmonious system composed of sub-systems. The human species counted as one such sub-system, and each individual human a sub-system of the species. The goodness of any particular entity or subs-system is a function of how well it contributes to the larger systems of which it is a part. In other words, Shaftesbury's vision of the universe is thoroughly teleological (i.e. concerned with the purposes of entities).
Unsurprisingly, Shaftesbury was a proponent of the so-called 'Argument from Design,' which infers the existence of an intelligent and powerful creator from the harmonious and complex nature of the universe. Yet Shaftesbury presents the argument in a somewhat unusual light by comparing the systemiticity of the universe with the systemiticity of the succession of ideas in our minds. Our ideas do not follow one another haphazardly - rather, their occurrence is (often) in accordance logical principles. This order is explained by the fact that the mind is governed by a rational force (the mind's intelligence). If this explanation appears apt, Shaftesbury concludes, then an exactly parallel argument should be accepted for the existence of some intelligent, governing force in the universe.
Moral Sentiment and Virtue
Shaftesbury saw the goodness of any entity or act as based in that things' contribution to its overall system, so that all creatures are capable of good actions. Yet he insists that something further is required for a creature's action to be virtuous: it must be done from a motive of goodness, and this motive requires the existence of a certain reflective power.
Attacks on Egoism=
External links
| Preceded by: Anthony Ashley Cooper |
Earl of Shaftesbury |
Succeeded by: Anthony Ashley Cooper |
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