The Aesthetics Research Centre invites you to a research seminar with
Michael Gill, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona
‘Shaftesbury on Life as a Work of Art’
Wednesday 17th January 2018 at 5pm in Keynes Seminar Room 17, University of Kent
In the first decade of the eighteenth-century Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, said that we ought to live our lives as though they are works of art. Shaftesbury might have been the first person to express that thought in English. He meant by it almost exactly the opposite of what many would take it to mean today. I will explain his idea of treating life as a work of art, and show how an understanding of it illuminates central features of Shaftesbury’s philosophy over all.
Michael Gill is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He works on ethics and the history of early modern philosophy. He has published two books: The British Moralists on Human Nature (Cambridge 2006) and Humean Moral Pluralism (Oxford 2014).