Shaftesbury’s Science of Happiness

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. It recovers the interpretative importance of Shaftesbury’s profound classicism—in particular, his admiration for the ancient Stoic moral philosophers—for an understanding of his philosophical objectives, and it challenges the general tendency of recent scholarship to marginalize or ignore the substantive content of that philosophy. It argues that Shaftesbury’s classicism finds its most important context, and his vindication of Stoicism and contempt for the moral teachings of Christianity its contemporary significance, in Locke’s distinctive treatment of classical moral philosophy. Precisely because scholars have paid scant attention to the latter, they have failed to comprehend the novelty and importance of the former. Shaftesbury’s admiration for Stoicism also informed his highly distinctive narrative of the history of philosophy, which emphasized how Christianity had misappropriated ancient moral philosophy for its own (worldly) purposes.