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Francis Hutcheson

1694 - 1746

About the Author

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

In The Library:

• author: British Moralists, being Selections from Writers principally of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (1897)
• author: An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1742)
• author: An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726)
• author: Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind (1730)
• translator: The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742)
• author: Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria with a Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747)

Quotations:

• Francis Hutcheson’s early formulation of the principle of “the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers” (1726) (10 March, 2013)