Tony Lynch

The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury drew on the naturalism of Locke to open up a naturalistic reading of experience conceived as a matter of reality revealing pattern perception that was lost to view in the impact of subsequent idealist readings of Locke's epistemology offered by Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711–1776). This essay recovers and explicates Shaftesbury's alternative to idealist conceptions of pattern making.

Ellis has produced perhaps the best introduction to, and analysis of, Rationalism that we have yet seen. He appreciates the power and contribution of the Rationalist urge to ‘pure theory’ in the hi...

Beau Brummell has a special place in the history of romanticism. Whereas followers of Shaftesbury and Rousseau typically looked to nature, to the primitive and spontaneous and effortless, Brummell looked instead to culture for the redemptive and for redemption. Rather than repudiate the stultifying social hierarchies of the past, the ugliness of commerce and industrialism, and the conformism of democracy, by looking outside for a natural, for a primitive or pastoral or wilderness-centered compensation, he sought to clear or create a space at the very heart of the city where romantic values might hold sway, and in their unchallenged authority shine a light out in the darkness.