Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria: with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics) - Hardcover

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

Francis Hutcheson was one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. He influenced not only leading thinkers, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, but also a wider circle of intellectuals in England, Europe, and America.
Hutcheson viewed philosophy as a practical matter, not merely a theoretical exercise, and in his Philosophiae Moralis Instituto Compendiaria, we have his arguments for how to live a virtuous, useful, engaged life based on belief in the benevolence of God, the harmony of the universe, and the sociable dispositions of human beings. The aim was to provide a text for university students, putting forward Hutcheson's optimistic view of human nature and its relationship to the Divinity, as well as providing students with the knowledge of natural and civil law required by the university curriculum.
In this Liberty Fund edition, the Latin text of 1745, Philosophiae Moralis Instituto Compendiaria, is printed facing its 1747 English translation, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. Passages left untranslated in the 1747 edition have been rendered into English for the first time, and the anonymous translator's interpolations have been identified. Luigi Turco's introduction and extensive annotations provide context, references, and, where needed, clarification for the modern reader.