Shaftesbury
English philosopher and statesman (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713), born in London into an influential aristocratic family — his grandfather was a prominent Whig politician — personally tutored as a child by the philosopher John Locke, his grandfather's close friend and then family secretary, following an educational plan based on the pedagogical principles Locke himself would later develop, and who, despite this early Lockean formation, would go on to build a moral philosophy radically removed from both the empiricism and the egoistic Hobbesianism that Locke and others left as their legacy to the early eighteenth century. His principal work, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), a collection of essays on aesthetics, ethics and religion written in an elegant, conversational style deliberately far removed from scholastic technical rigour, developed the influential theory of 'moral sense', according to which human beings possess an innate perceptive faculty, analogous to aesthetic taste, allowing them to intuitively and spontaneously distinguish between moral good and evil without need of egoistic rational calculation or fear of divine punishment, thereby directly contradicting the Hobbesian view of human nature as fundamentally selfish and requiring external coercion for sociability. Shaftesbury also developed an influential aesthetic theory closely uniting beauty, moral goodness and cosmic harmony in a single principle, arguing that the disinterested contemplation of beauty — both natural and artistic — cultivates and refines the very moral sensibility that enables the recognition of virtue, an idea anticipating central concepts of eighteenth-century aesthetics such as Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness. His optimistic philosophy of benevolent human nature, in sharp contrast to the prevailing Calvinist and Hobbesian pessimism, exerted decisive influence on the entire Scottish moral sentiment tradition — especially Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith — and on European Enlightenment aesthetics more broadly, making him one of the decisive founding figures of modern ethical and aesthetic thought.