Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, with a Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy - (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics) (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this new, dual-language edition, Hutcheson's Latin Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria is presented on facing pages with its English translation, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, together with all the relevant alterations of the 1745 edition relating to the 1742 edition of the Institutio, including all the omissions and additions by the translator in the Short Introduction.

Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he assumed the chair of moral philosophy in 1729.

Luigi Turco is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bologna.

Review Quotes

The second volume under review contains Hutcheson's Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria (Glasgow, 1742; 2nd edn., 1745) in conjunction with the English translation of it, published in 1747 with new texts and other additions. As Hutcheson points out at the very beginning, it is designed for students at the universities who had already finished their courses on logic and metaphysics. The "chief points to be enquired into in Moral Philosophy must be," according to Hutcheson, "what course of life is according to the intention of nature? Wherein consists happiness? And what is virtue?" (p. 23). The book itself contains the elements of this branch of philosophy and is divided into ethics ("teaching the nature of virtue and regulating the internal dispositions") and the law of nature, covering civil law ("or the laws and rights obtaining in natural liberty"), oeconomics ("or the laws and rights of several members of a family") and politics ("shewing the various plans of civil government, and the rights of states with respect to each other").

Heiner F. Klemme, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Spring 2008