- Lived:
- 1674 (or 1679 — the records disagree) – 1749 · London, then Aberdeen and Northumberland
- Tradition:
- English early-modern philosophy — Lockean empiricism turned into a rational moral philosophy, by a playwright
- The Big Idea:
- Morality needs no innate stamps and no arbitrary divine decrees. Reflect honestly on what kind of creature you are — rational, sociable, dependent — and duty follows from your own nature, as surely as geometry follows from figures.
- In their words:
- "They oblige us, not as dependent, but as reasonable beings."
- If you remember one thing:
- The first published defense of Locke's moral philosophy was written in secret by a twenty-something woman playwright — who then lost twenty years to poverty, nursery, and needle, and came back at fifty to finish the argument.