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John Brown (1715–1766) was a clergyman who achieved great but transient fame as a writer and moralist. His attack on Shaftesbury and “moral sense” philosophy, against which he employed utilitarian arguments and also arguments deriving from God’s benevolent intentions toward his creation, was published in 1751 and was later praised by John Stuart Mill. The central text of this volume, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), is a vigorous attack on the “vain, luxurious, and selfish effeminacy” of England’s higher ranks, in the wake of the loss of Minorca to the French at the opening of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Brown repeated the usual complaints of corruption that had been raised during the premiership of Walpole and argued that public virtue had been undermined by a preoccupation with luxury and commerce. Estimate was printed no fewer than seven times within the first year, earning the author the name “Estimate Brown.” Alongside Estimate , the volume includes four other works by Brown: his poem On Liberty (1749); his Essays on the Characteristicks (1751), which is an attack on Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks ; his Explanatory Defence of the Estimate (1758), in which Brown engaged to defend the work, to some modest extent, against his critics; and finally, a late work, Thoughts on Civil Liberty (1765). Two appendixes complement the texts: a brief tribute to Brown by Thomas Hollis (an Englishman who devoted his life to the cause of liberty and for whom this series is named), in which Hollis depicts Brown “as a weak man who nevertheless possessed a measure of virtue and talent, and who fell among thieves in the feral literary and political circles of Hanoverian England.” The second appendix provides Hollis’s own annotations to his copy of Estimate . The introduction, by David Womersley, places Brown’s writings and career in the context of eighteenth-century moralism and, naturally, in the tradition of British writing on liberty. The annotations will gloss now-unfamiliar words and explain now-obscure references to contemporary events, circumstances, and personalities. David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is an edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (2012).

By exploring the works of both Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Søren Kierkegaard, Lydia B. Amir finds a rich tapestry of ideas about the comic, the tragic, humor, and related concepts such as irony, ridicule, and wit. Amir focuses chiefly on these two thinkers, but she also includes Johann Georg Hamann, an influence of Kierkegaard's who was himself influenced by Shaftesbury. All three thinkers were devout Christians but were intensely critical of the organized Christianity of their milieux, and humor played an important role in their responses. The author examines the epistemological, ethical, and religious roles of humor in their philosophies and proposes a secular philosophy of humor in which humor helps attain the philosophic ideals of self-knowledge, truth, rationality, virtue, and wisdom.

El conjunto de intelectuales que mantienen algún tipo de vínculo con Pierre Bayle en Holanda, exiliados políticos o religiosos franceses e ingleses en su mayoría, constituye una constelación de relaciones que explica la gran trascendencia de las ideas y actitudes germinadas en los Países Bajos a finales del XVII en el ámbito de influencia de Spinoza y Pierre Bayle. A su vez, la influencia desarrollada por los componentes de ese círculo en los hombres de letras de Francia, Alemania, Italia y, en especial, Inglaterra y Escocia va a desencadenar notables consecuencias en el ámbito de la literatura y el arte del siglo ilustrado.

Anatomies of Unbelief: Clandestine Dialogues between Swift and Shaftesbury by David Alvarez and Patrick Muller is discussed. Alvarez and Miller continue the scholarly conversation about \"these two titanic writers,\" concluding that \"Swift came to regard Shaftesbury as a dangerous oracle of free-thinking and Deism, whereas the Earl saw in the Irish clergyman the epitome of 'Polemick Divinity,' . . . an ill-natured, self-serving satyr whose only wish was to mock his readers.\"

Today new forms of critical psychology are challenging the cognitive revolution that has dominated psychology for the past three decades. This book explores the historical roots of these new psychologies. It demonstrates that their ideas are not quite as new as is often supposed.

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts (painting, literature, architecture, gardening), and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume, first published in 2000, presents an edition of the text together with an introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading.

While the connection between Shaftesbury's Characteristics and Sterne's writing, particularly A Sentimental Journey, has been clearly established, Ms. Roccia's emphasis in this essay on the similarities of each work's ''characteristics''-their interrelationship of ethics and aesthetics- contributes fresh and important insights to a long-established influence. According to both Shaftesbury's philosophical way...