Francis Hutcheson was a crucial link between the continental European natural law tradition and the emerging Scottish Enlightenment. Hence, he is a pivotal figure in the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series. A contemporary of Lord Kames and George Turnbull, an acquaintance of David Hume, and the teacher of Adam Smith, Hutcheson was arguably the leading figure in making Scotland distinctive within the general European Enlightenment.
Moore (political science, Concordia U., Montreal) and Silverthorne
(classics, ancient history, and theology; U. of Exeter) offer the
first complete English translation of Hutcheson's (1694-1746)
Logicae Compendium (1756) and Metaphysicae Synopsis (1742). They
say the two works were considered indispensable texts for
instruction during the 18th century, and remain required reading
for a full understanding of his philosophy, but have not figured
prominently in studies of him partly because they were written in
Latin, and partly because they were written for students; his
English-language texts for adult readers published in the 1720s are
more popular.
Reference & Research Book News
August 2006
Much evidence stacked up on my bookshelves suggests--pace Hawes--a
determination to scrutinize and respect claims for the
Enlightenment: Liberty Press's ongoing series Natural Law and
Enlightenment Classics (which saw new editions this year of John
Millar's An Historical View of the English Government: From the
Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688 and
The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, Francis Hutcheson's Logic,
Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, and
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui's The Principles of Natural and Politic
Law); the several books that revalue Enlightenment aspirations as
they make philosophy the master key for unlocking cultural
preoccupations.
Studies in English Literature
Summer 2007
Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind includes
English translations of three of Francis Hutcheson's writings that
originally appeared in Latin. In A Compound of Logic To which is
prefixed a Dissertation On the Origin of Philosophy And Its
Principal Founders and Exponents (Logicae Compendium, Glasgow,
1756) Hutcheson classifies philosophy into logic (rational
philosophy), natural philosophy, and moral philosophy, following
the prototype of the Stoa. By logic, he understands "the art which
directs the mind in its acquisitions of Knowledge of things, and
may also be called science (scientia). Others define it as 'the art
of investigating and expressing truth" (p. 9). The division of the
work mainly follows the example of Antoine Arnauld's The Art of
Thinking (concept, judgment, syllogism, method); however, Hutcheson
deals with method in an appendix "on Topics, Fallacies, and
Method." Regarding content, he combines Aristotelian logic with the
new doctrine of ideas. Accordingly, logic is to be understood in a
very wide sense, as in the early example of the Compendium Logicae
(1729) of John Loudon, who taught philosophy in Glasgow between
1699 and 1750 (cf. p. xi). Loudon's work had an immediate impact on
Hutcheson's treatise, which presumably had been written, according
to James Moore, in the 1720s for the instruction of students in his
Dublin academy.
Supposedly, A Synopsis of Metaphysics Comprending Ontology and
Pneumatology (Metaphysicae Synopsis, Glasgow, 1742; 2nd, enlarged
edn., 1744) was also written in the 1720s in connection with
Hutcheson's teachings at Dublin. In this tripartite work, Hutcheson
deals with ontology ("On Being and the Common Attributes of
Things") and, under the notion of pneumatology, with the doctrine
of the human mind and God. In Glasgow, as a professor of moral
philosophy, Hutcheson only taught on the third part because
ontology and pneumatology were Loudon's field of responsibility as
a professor of logic. In his introduction, James Moore points out
that Loudon held his lectures on metaphysics according to
Determinationes Pneumatologicae et Ontologicae by the Dutch
philosopher Gerard de Vries, and that Hutcheson designed his
metaphysics as a "counterpart to the work of de Vries" (p. xiii).
Hutcheson intended to replace de Vries's Aristotelianism with the
new doctrine of ideas. As James Moore puts it: "Hutcheson's
ontology consisted very largely in the translation of scholastic
terms of being into the language of ideas" (p. xiv).
Both writings are of particular interest for the Hutcheson scholar,
since they are the only writings in which Hutcheson addresses logic
and metaphysics in the form of a textbook. The third work in this
volume is an English translation of On the Natural Sociability of
Mankind, Hutcheson's Glasgow inaugural oration of 1730, where he
tries to defend a notion of the state of nature that is contrary to
Hobbes, Mandeville, and Pufendorf--a notion that takes the natural
benevolence and sociability of mankind into account. Accordingly,
the state of nature signifies "either the common condition of
mankind or the most perfect condition which they can attain by the
resources implanted in their nature. And certainly this most
perfect state rightly takes the name of natural" (p. 198; cf. p.
200). Not vices, but virtues, are what is natural to us. What
Hobbes and others called the "state of nature," Hutcheson names "an
uncultivated state, where our natural abilities have never been
exercised" (p. 200). Culture and social life, then, are the keys to
a virtuous life. Because of "some wonderful sympathy of nature" (p.
204), human beings find their greatest pleasure in exercising their
unselfish and sociable nature.
Heiner F. Klemme, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Spring 2008
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