Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind. Francis Hutcheson
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LOGIC, METAPHYSICS, AND THE NATURAL SOCIABILITY OF MANKIND
NATURAL LAW AND
ENLIGHTENMENT CLASSICS
Knud Haakonssen
General Editor
This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
© 2006 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
This eBook edition published in 2012.
Cover image: Detail of portrait of Francis Hutcheson by Allan Ramsay (c. 1740–45), oil on canvas, reproduced courtesy of the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.
eBook ISBN: E-PUB 978-1-61487-194-1
CONTENTS
Dissertation on the Origin of Philosophy and Its Principal Founders and Exponents
PART II. On the Noetic Judgment and the Proposition
Appendix on Topics, Fallacies, and Method
A Synopsis of Metaphysics Comprehending Ontology and Pneumatology
The Arguments of the Chapters
PART I. On Being and the Common Attributes of Things
CHAPTER 1. On Being (De Ente)
CHAPTER 2. On the Axioms of Metaphysics
CHAPTER 3. On the Properties of Being
CHAPTER 4. On the Principal Divisions of Being
CHAPTER 5. On the Categories and the General Properties of Being
PART II. On the Human Mind
CHAPTER 1. On the Powers of the Mind, and First on the Understanding
CHAPTER 2. On the Will
CHAPTER 3. Whether Spirit Is a Different Thing from Body
CHAPTER 4. On the Union of the Mind with the Body, and on a Separate State
PART III. On God
CHAPTER 1. In Which It Is Shown That There Is a God
CHAPTER 2. On the Natural Virtues of God
CHAPTER 3. On the Divine Virtues Concerned with Understanding
CHAPTER 4. On the Will of God
CHAPTER 5. On the Operations of God
On the Natural Sociability of Mankind
Inaugural Oration
Bibliography
Index
Francis Hutcheson’s A Compend of Logic and A Synopsis of Metaphysics represent his only systematic treatments of logic, ontology, and pneumatology, or the science of the soul. They were considered indispensable texts for the instruction of students in the eighteenth century. There were six (posthumous) editions of his Logic;1 and seven editions of his Metaphysics (five of them posthumous).2 Any serious study of Hutcheson’s philosophy must take into account his understanding of logic: of ideas and terms, judgments and propositions, reasoning and discourse, topics, fallacies, and method; and metaphysics: of being, substance, cause and effect, the intellect, the will, the soul, the attributes of God.
Notwithstanding the importance of the subject matter, Hutcheson’s texts on logic and metaphysics have not figured prominently in studies of his philosophy. This may be explained in part by the circumstance that they were written in Latin; the present volume provides the first complete translation of these writings into English. The relative neglect of Hutcheson’s Logic and Metaphysics may also be linked to the fact that they were composed for the use of students. Unlike his English-language works, published in the 1720s and written for adult readers,3 but like A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747; originally composed in Latin as Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, 1742, 1745), his logic and metaphysics were intended for classroom use.4 Thus, the significance of his academic or Latin writings can be best appreciated by recognizing their derivative character: they belong to a textbook tradition of commentary on the writings of others. Some of the most distinctive and central arguments of Hutcheson’s philosophy—the importance of ideas brought to mind by the internal senses, the presence in human nature of calm desires, of generous and benevolent instincts—will be found to emerge in the course of these writings. But the direction of the arguments, the structure of the books, the questions he found it necessary to address can be best understood and appreciated by recognizing that they derive from texts assigned to students by his predecessors and his contemporaries at the University of Glasgow in the first half of the eighteenth century.
A Compend of Logic
Two approaches to the study of logic were combined in the teaching