«Il gentile Platone d'Europa». Quattro saggi su Lord Shaftesbury

This study focuses on the thematic cores of Lord Shaftesbury's (1671-1713) thought - cosmology, morality, theology, art - through the lens of those aesthetic theories that represent perhaps the philosopher's greatest contribution to eighteenth-century European thought. Of Shaftesbury's aesthetics, we analyse the shift from a metaphysics of beauty - still strongly Platonic in character and committed to defining the theoretical status of categories such as 'beauty', 'genius' and 'taste' - to themes more closely related to the theory of art, which found concrete application in Shaftesbury's design and commissioning of emblems for the frontispieces of his own philosophical writings.