Religia, moralność, światopogląd – różne oblicza Berkeleyowskiej krytyki filozofii Shaftesbury’ego .......... 149

 RELIGION, MORALITY, AND WORLDVIEW. VARIOUS FACETS OF BERKELEY’S CRITICISM OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHAFTESBURY

The article presents the criticism of Shaftesbury’s stance as expressed in the third dialogue in Berkeley’s Alciphron. The criticism deals with several fundamental issues: emotivist ethics based on the functions of the moral mind, esthetization of morality and religion, and a presumably atheistic nature of the ideas by the author of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. However, instead of an explicit analysis of the details of Shaftesbury’s stance, Berkeley reconstructs it, pointing out conclusions that follow from it in his opinion. This criticism seems partly justified because some aspects of the discussed philosophy are indeed unclear whereas the limitations of the emotivist moral thought were also spotted by David Hume, who was soon to develop it further. On the other hand, the essence of the debate is, to a large extent, of a worldview nature. Interestingly, it is Shaftesbury, constantly calling up Antiquity, that gets closer to some of the Enlightenment ideals (self-determination and rationality of the individual, faith in progress) than one of the avant-garde philosophers of the time, Berkeley, who does refer to the works of John locke, Pierre Bayle, and occasionally Isaac Newton, but defends a traditional worldview with the order of the human world rooted in religion.