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Montaigne has been called the founder of modern skepticism. According to this view, he was the first to put forward in a compelling way the arguments of ancient skepticism that had been rediscovered in the sixteenth century. The “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne's longest and most explicitly philosophical essay, presents the skeptical case in a sympathetic way and that presentation has been taken to express Montaigne's own philosophical position. But is Montaigne a skeptic? Is his philosophical stance a reappropriation of ancient skepticism or is he rather a profoundly original philosopher who in some way incorporates a skeptical tone or “moment” within his own original thought? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ‘solipsism’ derives from the Latin solus ipse, meaning oneself alone. Broadly speaking a method, or doctrine, or point of view is solipsistic to the extent that it assigns a fundamental, irreducible, and asymmetrical role to subjective phenomena of the kind that are normally indicated by use of the singular form of the first person pronoun. Solipsistic theories, that is, stress what is both unique and irreducible about, say, the ‘I’, me, myself, my ego, my subjectivity, or my experience. Explanatory reliance on such essentially first-personal phenomena is a necessary condition of adoption of a form of solipsism, but it is not sufficient. The use made by Descartes of the principle ‘Cogito, ergo sum’, for example, requires that the principle be formulated in the first person singular. The Cartesian cogito is not, however, intrinsically or inescapably solipsistic, if only because it fails to imply the necessary asymmetry between what is the case for me, as against what is the case for others. On the contrary, as indeed Descartes himself explicitly points out, the cogito is a principle that anyone at all can apply to himself or herself. Solipsism, I shall take it, requires commitment to a stronger view, namely that there are basic metaphysical and epistemological truths of the form ‘I alone–’, or ‘Only I—’. Ontologically, for example, a solipsist might claim ‘I alone exist’, ‘Only I am conscious’, or, in Wittgenstein's words, ‘Mine is the first and only world’. Epistemologically, on the other hand, solipsism might take the form of a theory committed to the conclusion that ‘For all it is possible to know, only I exist’, or ‘There can be no justification for denying that I alone am conscious’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once more I come before the public with a work on the history of a nation which is not mine by birth. As a foreigner, coming to the history of … Spain [from] … that of other West European societies, I was frequently struck by the extent to which … phenomena … assumed … to be … Spanish … could be found [elsewhere]. ALL HISTORY RESTS UPON ANALYTICAL ASSUMPTIONS, WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE MADE EXPLICIT That the seventeenth-century English political experience was spectacular and remarkable may not require emphasis, either to historians or to general readers. A recent account begins accordingly by listing some of its extraordinary features. It then concludes: ‘No history can account for such dazzling achievements. It is perhaps as well to gaze upon so bright a firmament rather than to try to measure the gaseous compounds of each star.’ Thus did Lord Brooke write in The Nature of Truth (1640) of ‘leaving the search for causes to those who are content, with Icarus, to burn their wings at a fire too hot for them’. There are few historians, particularly of the seventeenth century, who will not respect the prudence of this stance. We cannot account for everything, or anything with finality. Explanation presupposes an informed understanding of what it is we are attempting to explain. Moreover, explanation isn't everything. One of the most important features of history is its capacity to tell a story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophy as advice Shaftesbury's “Soliloquy” had the subtitle, “Advice to an Author,” linking his essay to that broad genre of literature published in early modern Europe under the denomination of “advice.” Though advice literature ranged from guides on governance for princes to handbooks on social punctilios for the upwardly mobile, much of it concerned the means and goals of a satisfactory life. The genre was the chief vehicle for the dissemination of the language of “politeness” in the seventeenth century. Since Shaftesbury was engaged in raising that concept to new complexity and centrality, it was fitting to pay the genre tribute in this essay's title. More generally, Shaftesbury's project was deeply related to the advice genre since his writing covered behavior, morals, and politics, and was ethical and pragmatic in orientation. However, because advice literature was didactic, its style was direct, indicative, and unambiguous. Inserting “advice” in his title, Shaftesbury evoked the genre as a foil for the discursively complex activity that “Soliloquy” both enunciated and instantiated. “Soliloquy” commenced with a meditation on “the Way and Manner of advising” itself. According to a commonplace, Shaftesbury wrote, no one is better for the advice he receives. Suggesting that it is one thing for an advisor to proffer advice but quite another for an advisee to absorb and follow it, the commonplace posed the problem of persuasion, the most elementary of rhetorical quandaries. Indicating effective vehicles for the practice of advising and embodying them in his own text were central tasks of Shaftesbury's mature project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Character” The word “character” encapsulated Shaftesbury's answer to the problem of the self, since it referred to the qualities of consistency, unity and autonomy, founded on well-developed interiority, that defined the philosophical being and moral actor. The term's etymology, of which Shaftesbury was well aware, suggested its purchase. The noun could be traced to a complex of ideas arising from the Greek verb, kharasso, meaning, among other things, “to sharpen,” “to brand,” “to stamp,” and “to engrave.” Thus, the Greek kharaktēr had the capacity to relate contrasting ideas: while the term presupposed the malleability of the object stamped, it also implied the stability of the stamp on the object; while it referred to the outward appearance, it might also refer to an underlying pattern. This capacity of the word kharaktēr to coordinate the self's plasticity and durability as well as its interior and exterior manifestations was evident in an Epictetan injunction, favored by Shaftesbury: “Lay down for yourself, at the outset, a certain stamp and type of character [kharaktera kai tupon] for yourself, which you are to maintain whether you are by yourself or are meeting with people.” While assuming that the self must model itself, the injunction also insisted on the durability of character. Moreover, modeling pertained to and related both the form of the inner life and the shape of self-presentation. “Character” expressed both the drive for a well-modeled inwardness and the recognition that ineluctably the self was also a social entity. In Shaftesbury's central project of forming “character,” the modeling of an outward self was as important as constructing the inward one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notebooks An Inquiry Concerning Virtue had certainly been completed by 1698, a year marking a rupture in Shaftesbury's life. Elected to the Commons in 1695, he was in the process of making a public name for himself. However, he refused to stand in the elections of 1698 in order to adopt a life of an entirely new character. Instead of actively participating in public matters, assiduously managing the affairs of his family, and otherwise enjoying the social and intellectual life in Town and Country which accompanied his status, he went to Holland where he pursued a studious retirement. The reversal was abrupt, entire and striking. If it suggests the operations of a complicated personality, the suggestion is confirmed in the personal notebooks that he began keeping when he arrived on the Continent in 1698. “Natural Affection” was the heading under which Shaftesbury commenced his reflections at Rotterdam in August 1698. From the start, he reiterated commitments familiar from the Inquiry, the affective basis for human action; an ideal of human moral autarky; a conception of beneficent cosmic order. He defined natural affection as “not that wch is only towards Relations; but towards all Mankind,” a universal, caring but disinterested love, informed by a wise acceptance of the overall design of nature. However, having written this, he went on to ask: “When shall this happy Disposition be fix'd, that I may feel it perpetually, as now but seldome? When shall I be intirely thus affected, & feel this as my Part grown naturall to me?” Not only did he experience natural affection only occasionally and partially, but he found reason to doubt the very naturalness of the natural affections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Training” On the binding of the first volume of one set of his notebooks, Shaftesbury inscribed the Greek word, Askémata, “exercises,” which can be taken as a title for the notebooks. The later Roman stoic inspiration for the title is clear enough, since, on the first page of this volume, Shaftesbury copied passages from the chapter in Arrian's Epictetus, Peri askēseōs, “Of training” or “Of exercise.” However, the title indicates more than intellectual genealogy, for it describes the function of the notebooks. The chapter Peri askēseōs revealed a central preoccupation of Epictetus, namely, the training that conduced to wisdom. Wisdom arose in the willingness to limit strivings to what was within the power of the moral athlete or, in Epictetus's characteristic vocabulary, “within the sphere of his moral purpose [proairesis]” The sphere of moral purpose was that of will and choice. Since wisdom was identified with a rigorous ideal of moral autonomy, training aimed to enhance acting “without hindrance in choice [orexis] and in aversion [ekklisis]” Training was necessitated by the fact that habit, ethos, was “a powerful influence,” and men were usually habituated to direct their choice and aversion only over external things. As Epictetus wrote, “if you allow training to turn outwards, towards the things that are not in the realm of moral purpose, you will have neither your desire successful in attaining what it would, nor your aversion successful in avoiding what it would.” The response of the therapeutic stoic was to “set a contrary habit to counteract this habit.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seriousness Shaftesbury's first serious attempt to actuate his philosophical vocation was An Inquiry Concerning Virtue. He wrote it in the later 1690s and, though he seems not to have intended immediate publication, it appeared when John Toland, a member of his circle, had it published in 1699. Much later, the fourth earl of Shaftesbury said that the third earl had objected to the publication and bought up all the copies. But, as A. B. Worden has pointed out, Shaftesbury seems to have cooperated in the translation of the treatise into French by Pierre Desmaizeaux (1673–1745), Huguenot émigré and free-lance man of letters in the international intellectual scene. Moreover, Shaftesbury included a revised version of the Inquiry in Characteristicks and assigned it a strategic importance. Here one must remember that the early editions of Characteristicks had three volumes: the first containing “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” Sensus Communis, and “Soliloquy”; the second, the Inquiry and “The Moralists”; and the third, “Miscellaneous Reflections.” According to Shaftesbury, the heart of the endeavor was the second volume. He called the first volume “preparatory” to the second and distinguished the critical task of the first volume from the constructive task of the second. Whereas in the first volume he deployed “his sapping Method and unravelling Humour” and assumed a “sceptical Mein,” in the second volume, particularly in the Inquiry, he “discovers himself openly, as a plain Dogmatist, a Formalist, and Man of Method” In the Inquiry, not only did he plainly assert his philosophical positions, but he also adopted the method and style of formal philosophy, “dry Reasonings.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A philosophical vocation As a young man, the third earl of Shaftesbury already recognized his antagonism to current trends in philosophy. In 1694, at the age of twenty-three, he wrote to John Locke: It is not with mee as with an Empirick, one that is studdying of Curiositys, raising of new Inventions that are to gain credit to the author, starting of new Notions that are to amuse the World and serve them for Diverting or for tryall of their Acuteness … Descartes, or Mr Hobbs, or any of their Improvers have the same reason to make a-doe, and bee Jealouse about their notion's and DISCOVERY'S, as they call them; as a practizing Apothecary or a mountebank has to bee Jealouse about the Compositions that are to goe by his name … for my part: I am so far from thinking that mankind need any new Discoverys … the thing that I would ask of God should bee to make men live up to what they know; and that they might bee so wise as to desire to know no other things then what belong'd to em, and what lay plain before them … What I count True Learning, and all wee can profitt by, is to know our selves … whilst Such are Philosophers and Such Philosophy whence I can Learn ought from, of this kind; there is no Labour, no Studdy, no Learning that I would not undertake. In distinguishing two conceptions of philosophy, the letter adumbrated Shaftesbury's mature thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the place of music in “ideology” – by which I mean both Condillac's study of the development and structure of knowledge, preparing Destutt de Tracy's coinage of the term, and at the same time the more recent sense of a systematic cultural network of meanings – I have sought to understand the place of music within specific discourses in the eighteenth century while attempting to rekindle an interest in “musicology” as cultural discourse. Having discussed the texts of Condillac and Rousseau in some detail, I will now broaden the scope of my analysis. I want to shift the focus of my inquiry from the primordial semiotic bond between the voice and passion at the origin of society to the connection between music and passion in the eighteenth-century present. A relation to the present was always implicit in Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines and Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues. The importance of these essays, as I have suggested, is not so much in what they tell about an original state, as in their effort to seat an anthropological discourse in the present. This discourse comes into particular focus, I argue, in medical texts and in writings on musical theater. In both these areas, music filled an epistemological gap by providing a way to discuss and represent the relationship between observable behavior and external forces, on the one hand, and inner passions on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]