An engaging account of how Shaftesbury revolutionized Western philosophy At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), developed the first comprehensive philosophy of beauty to be written in English. It revolutionized Western philosophy. In A Philosophy of Beauty, Michael Gill presents an engaging account of how Shaftesbury's thought profoundly shaped modern ideas of nature, religion, morality, and art-and why, despite its long neglect, it remains compelling today. Before Shaftesbury's magnum opus, Charactersticks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), it was common to see wilderness as ugly, to associate religion with fear and morality with unpleasant restriction, and to dismiss art as trivial or even corrupting. But Shaftesbury argued that nature, religion, virtue, and art can all be truly beautiful, and that cherishing and cultivating beauty is what makes life worth living. And, as Gill shows, this view had a huge impact on the development of natural religion, moral sense theory, aesthetics, and environmentalism. Combining captivating historical details and flashes of humor, A Philosophy of Beauty not only rediscovers and illuminates a fascinating philosopher but also offers an inspiring reflection about the role beauty can play in our lives.

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this 2006 volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals.

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals.

Michael B. Gill offers an original account of Humean moral pluralism. Moral pluralism is the view that there are different ultimate moral reasons for action, that those different reasons can sometimes come into conflict with each other, and that there exist no invariable ordering principles that tell us how to resolve such conflicts. If moral pluralism is true, we will at times have to act on moral decisions for which we can give no fully principled justification. Humeanism is the view that our moral judgments are based on our sentiments, that reason alone could not have given rise to our moral judgments, and that there are no mind-independent moral properties for our moral judgments to track. In this book, Gill shows that the combination of these two views produces a more accurate account of our moral experiences than the monistic, rationalist, and non-naturalist alternatives. He elucidates the historical origins of the Humean pluralist position in the works of David Hume, Adam Smith, and their eighteenth century contemporaries, and explains how recent work in moral psychology has advanced this position. And he argues for the position's superiority to the non-naturalist pluralism of W. D. Ross and the monism of Kantianism and consequentialism. The pluralist account of the content of morality has been traditionally perceived as belonging with non-naturalist intuitionism. The Humean sentimentalist account of morality has been traditionally perceived as not belonging with any view of morality's content at all. Humean Moral Pluralism explodes both those perceptions. It shows that pluralism and Humeanism belong together, and that they make a philosophically powerful couple.