The Cambridge Platonists were a group of religious thinkers who attended and taught at Cambridge from the 1640s until the 1660s. The four most important of them were Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and Henry More. The most prominent sentimentalist moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment – Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith – knew of the works of the Cambridge Platonists. But the Scottish sentimentalists typically referred to the Cambridge Platonists only briefly and in passing. The surface of Hutcheson, (...) Hume, and Smith's texts can give the impression that the Cambridge Platonists were fairly distant intellectual relatives of the Scottish sentimentalists – great great-uncles, perhaps, and uncles of a decidedly foreign ilk. But this surface appearance is deceiving. There were deeply significant philosophical connections between the Cambridge Platonists and the Scottish sentimentalists, even if the Scottish sentimentalists themselves did not always make it perfectly explicit. (shrink)

Scholars of Shaftesbury generally consider his notion of disinterestedness as the beginning of modern aesthetics while connecting it questionably with a view of modernity as defined in terms of the segregation of truth, beauty, and goodness. To read Shaftesbury differently, it is necessary to look into the textual circumstances of his key aesthetic ideas. In particular, it is important to recognize his implicit use of Sir William Temple's discussion of the Chinese garden immediately before the few justly famous passages about (...) the beauty of the ocean, the vale, and the fruit trees and about the free and spontaneous response of the human character which constitutes the aesthetic experience. As well as a useful illumination for his new understanding of disinterestedness, this unusual involvement of a radically different artistic and philosophical tradition may also be his momentary revelation and acknowledgement of an otherwise hidden metaphysical inspiration for his revolutionary aesthetics. (shrink)