Lord Shaftesbury 1671 – 1713

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was an English philosopher and one of the most influential moral theorists of the early eighteenth century. His Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times collected his philosophical essays and dialogues, in which he developed an account of moral life centered on a natural moral sense and on the harmony of public and private good. He helped to inaugurate the Scottish-English tradition of moral-sense philosophy that runs through Hutcheson and Hume, and his cultural ideal of polite, free conversation shaped the early Enlightenment imagination.