I Moralisti

Lord Shaftesbury's "The Moralists", published in its final version in 1709, drew the attention of scholars and ordinary readers to what would become the main concepts of modern aesthetics: taste, genius, hierarchy of the arts, the sublime, disinterest, je-ne-sais-quoi (I don't know what). In this work, Shaftesbury analyses the human faculties involved in aesthetic judgement, the relationship between art and nature, and between ethics and aesthetics: thanks to Shaftesbury, all these topics have become fundamental to the agenda of any modern scholar of aesthetics and have been transmitted by him to European thought of the eighteenth century and beyond.