Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury
born Feb. 26, 1671, London, Eng.
died Feb. 15, 1713, Naples [Italy]
English politician and philosopher,
grandson of the famous 1st earl and one of the
principal English Deists.
His early education was directed by John
Locke, and he attended Winchester College. He
entered Parliament in 1695 and, succeeding as
3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in 1699, attended
Parliament regularly in the House of Lords for
the remainder of William III’s reign. He pursued
an independent policy in the House of Lords as
well as in the House of Commons. In July 1702 he
retired from public life.
Shaftesbury’s philosophy owed something to
the Cambridge Platonists, who had stressed the
existence in man of a natural moral sense.
Shaftesbury advanced this concept against both
the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Fall and
against the premise that the state of nature was
a state of unavoidable warfare.
Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism, his contention
that what man sees of beauty or truth is only a
shadow of absolute beauty or truth, dominated
his attitude to religion and to the arts. During
his lifetime his fame as a writer was
comparatively slight, for he published little
before 1711; in that year appeared his
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, in which his chief works were assembled.
The effect of this book was immediate and was
felt on the European continent as well as in
England; indeed, English Deism was transmitted
to Germany almost entirely through translations
of his writings. Alexander Pope, Joseph Butler,
Francis Hutcheson, Mark Akenside, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and Immanuel Kant were among those
who were to some degree affected by Shaftesbury.
