This chapter explores theologian and pastor Johann Joachim Spalding’s immensely popular Bestimmung des Menschen (eleven editions between 1748 and 1804), its reverberations throughout the German Enlightenment, and the ways in which it intersected with both philosophical and religious questions about humankind’s place in the world. The chapter discusses the ways in which religious thinkers attempted to provide new “apologies” for Christianity against deism and atheism, how they did so in a modern, literary German that solidified their positions in the public sphere, and how these interventions also shaped philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century.

This chaptercomments on the relationship between moderation and civility and argues that the latter can work as an effective antidote to a festering climate of fear, rage, and intimidation.

In this chapter, I argue that Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique, a conception according to which aesthetic judgment has its own a priori principle, left open the possibility for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. This judgment however could not arise in response to a quality in the object of nature, but instead could only be limited to works of art. More specifically, the origin of ugliness as a pure aesthetic category for Kant is epistemic, that is, in the failure of the artist’s power of judgment, a failure of the artist to find the appropriate form or concept for the manifold content of her imagination. In the third Critique, Kant calls these works of art “original nonsense.” I conclude that, once limited to works of art, pure judgments of ugliness cannot represent a threat to Kant’s more general project of moral teleology.

In this chapter, we consider a group of philosophers who formed their views in opposition to voluntarist natural law. Although there are important differences between Spinoza, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Leibniz, all four were united by their opposition to voluntarism. For voluntarists, even natural law is a kind of positive law since it is created by God’s discretionary imposition. Against this, Cudworth complained that voluntarism makes morality “positive, arbitrary and factitious only” and unable to explain morality’s “eternal and immutable” character. Leibniz was also a critic of positivist law, and he subversively reinterprets law in terms of love. Justice, he says, is the “charity of the wise.” For his part, Spinoza opposes not just positivist law but law itself. Indeed, although his great metaphysical work is titled Ethics, it constitutes nothing less than a metaphysical reduction of ethical or normative categories. At the same time, he develops a deeply attractive account of human freedom that inspired thinkers to come (including Nietzsche). Shaftesbury draws mostly from Cudworth, but in a way that gives rise to the moral sense tradition of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.

Chapter 8 shows that Kant’s thoughts on humor can be viewed as part of his wider aesthetic theory. Kant’s view of laughter at humor can be interpreted in terms of his theory of a harmonious free play of the faculties. What are the sources of his account of humor, and how did his thoughts about humor develop? Kant combines elements of incongruity, superiority, and release theories of humor. While responding to authors such as Moses Mendelssohn, Thomas Hobbes, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Kant adds his own, more original, thoughts about humor by appealing to his theory of a free play between the imagination and understanding. Once Kant begins to understand aesthetic responses in terms of a harmonious free play, it puts him in a position to connect humor to his aesthetic theory.

Chapter 3 examines adherent beauty or partly conceptual beauty. How are beauty and the good related? Like Johann Georg Sulzer and David Hume, Kant distinguishes between free beauty and purpose-based beauty, or the kind grounded in the purposes or aims of the object or artwork. Even in his early aesthetics, Kant holds that beauty and goodness are distinct concepts yet can be conjoined. Purpose-based beauty is central to Kant’s early aesthetics, and he calls it “self-standing.” This kind of beauty is retained in the third Critique in the form of adherent beauty, yet a fundamental shift occurs: he there calls free beauty “self-standing.”

This chapter explores a variety of philosophical engagements with Cicero in the long eighteenth century, with particular attention to the varied, and at times contradictory, purposes that Cicero might serve. Following an introductory discussion of Cicero and John Locke, the chapter proceeds thematically, turning first to Cicero and eighteenth-century ethics, then to eloquence, civil religion, and law, and finally to Cicero’s status as an exemplar of the active life. In exploring these themes, the chapter deals with the Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley-Cooper, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Adams, James Wilson, and Immanuel Kant.

In the time period from Berkeley to David Hume the architect and spectator metaphors were in competition with the legislative metaphor. Shaftesbury emphasized the architect metaphor where one assumes that God, the divine architect, has so designed human beings that we know what is right without relying upon the legislative paradigm. Human beings are endowed with a moral sense by the divine architect. Francis Hutcheson tried to synthesize the legislator and architect metaphors while adding that of the spectator. The perspective of the impartial spectator helps us determine what is right, avoiding personal bias or acting out of self-interest. Hume’s skepticism about the existence of divinely implanted moral sense led him to explain our sense of justice through a secular version of the spectator metaphor. Hume was very aware of the basic dilemma that adhering to the rules of justice in particular cases did not always produce the most good but that it was nonetheless important that people obey the rules of justice even in those cases. Hume sought to demonstrate what motivates people to act on rules that would be approved from the legislative perspective without recourse to divine intervention.

This chapter surveys the origins of aesthetics in eighteenth-century literary criticism, as major poets were examined in the light of concepts such as ‘beauty’. The treatment of art as a topic for moral thought gave a more polite, philosophical turn to the hitherto raucous and satirical character of early eighteenth-century critical practice. The chapter examines the development of thought about form and psychology encouraged by seventeenth-century French critics, followed by Addison, Shaftesbury, and later thinkers such as Burke, who presaged the gothic. Particular attention is given to Hume, Alison and Gerard, together with other Scots theorists of ‘belles lettres’. The discussion charts the increasing influence on criticism of such terms as ‘sublime,’ ‘taste,’ ‘genius,’ ‘originality,’ ‘imagination, and ‘art’ itself. An important element is the place of creative writers as aesthetic theorists, such as Pope, Joseph Warton, and Edward Young. Nor is the period’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson, immune to the vocabulary of aesthetics. The contribution of visual artists is illustrated by the writings of Hogarth and Reynolds, while a final section examines theory’s relation to practice.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century moral philosophers, divines, and literati almost unanimously agreed that theism is necessary to sustain community and social stability. With this correlation in place, atheists were routinely denied the capacity for human sympathy. To make this case, the chapter focuses on two midcentury novels by Sarah Fielding: The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). In these fictions, Fielding employs atheism to explore both the limits of modern selfhood and the limits of literary representation. Alongside eighteenth-century moral philosophers like John Locke, Shaftesbury, and Lord Kames, whom I examine in the chapter’s first section, Fielding casts the atheist as the fundamental incarnation of a completely autonomous self. More to the point, she insists that that self is incapable of integrating successfully into a wider community defined by developing notions of civility, sociability, and fellow feeling.

Chapter 3 narrates the development of Locke’s theory of toleration during the early 1660s and the period of his most consequential involvement in the political circles of the earl of Shaftesbury. The critical development, for Locke as for Hobbes, was the fall of the earl of Clarendon and the rise of the so-called Cabal ministry. This development cast the conformist clergy into disfavour and elevated policies of politique religious Indulgence that were often associated with court Hobbism. Locke was immersed in the Erastian political projects of Shaftesbury’s circle during these years and produced his preliminary ‘Essay concerning Toleration’. This chapter reveals the ‘Essay’ to have been a transitional text, moving towards assertion of a right to religious exercise but still influenced, and compromised, by a striking deference to sovereignty and civil religion. Shaftesbury and Locke, by allying themselves with this mixture of policies, found themselves vulnerable to charges of Hobbism, not least in the polemics of Samuel Parker. Locke’s initial effort to escape this critique can be dated to this period.

John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury were bound by close personal ties, yet they had opposing views of the mind and the nature of language. Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks is the very antithesis of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This chapter shows that Locke anticipated the development of mainstream psychology, especially with his concept of the association of ideas. When Locke presented examples of various types of association, they were minimal, conveying little extra detail. Shaftesbury proposed a dialogical view of the mind and used language in a very different way than Locke. Shaftesbury’s view of thinking, as internal dialogue, curiously anticipates Freud’s self-analysis. Shaftesbury’s examples are extended, and he does not coerce them into a theoretical structure. In the contrast between Locke and Shaftesbury, we can see the beginning of debates about the mind that persist in the present.