Hamish Riley-Smith

HUTCHESON,Francis A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, in three books; containing the Elements of Ethicks and the Law of Nature Glasgow, Robert Foulis 1747  

Thick octavo, contemporary calf, upper hinge cracked but holding, top of spine chipped, (2) + ivpp + (6) + 347pp, contemporary ownership in ink on front blank leaf of B.Drayton

First edition in English, first published in latin in 1745, was a classroom text for students and a work of extreme importance in Adam Smith’s intellectual development.Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), who could be described as the Father of the Scottish Enlightenment, was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University from 1727 and Adam Smith’s tutor, of whom Adam Smith called “the never-to-be-forgotten Hutcheson”. Hutcheson was one of the earliest propounders of what is known as the utilitarian doctrine of ethics and his teaching in this may be regarded as the foundation in the corresponding theory of economics, whose supporters included Smith, Bentham, James Mill and to a modified degree John Stuart Mill.Of Hutcheson’s influence on Adam Smith, “Dugald Stewart seems to have heard Smith admit that it was Hutcheson in his lectures that suggested to him that particular theory of the right of property which he used to teach in his own unpublished lectures on jurisprudence, and which founded the right of property on the general sympathy of mankind with the reasonable expectation of the occupant to enjoy unmolested the object which he had acquired or discovered”. Rae, Life of Adam Smith.“Hutcheson was a practical moralist in the Ciceronian tradition, a teacher of virtue who sought to persuade his students at Glasgow University and his reading public, not just to understand the good life but to live it”. Miller.Gaskell, The Foulis Press no.45. Thomas Miller, Francis Hutcheson and the Civic Humanist Tradition, in Hook & Sher (ed) The Glasgow Enlightenment pp.40-55. Jessop, Scottish Enlightenment, p.145. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p.128. Graham, Scottish Men of Letters in the 18th Century, Hutcheson pp.31-34.

£950

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