Francis Hutcheson

"Francis Hutcheson is one of the central figures in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Read widely in Britain, France, Germany, and America, he influenced philosophers ranging from his student Adam Smith to Kant. After the initial reaction to his first major work, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson took stock of his critics and wrote An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. The first half of the work, the Essay, presents a rich moral psychology built on a theory of the passions and an account of motivation deepening and augmenting the doctrine of moral sense developed in the Inquiry. The Illustrations on the Moral Sense is a brilliant attack on rationalist moral theories and the font of many of the arguments against the motivating power of reason taken up by Hume and used to this day." "Despite intrinsic merits of the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and the Illustrations on the Moral Sense, and their vast influence, the original English-language text has until recently been available only in expensive reprint. The Liberty Fund edition makes Hutcheson's seminal work widely available in English in a critical edition collating the first edition of 1728 with Hutcheson's revision of 1742."--BOOK JACKET.

"With the publication of Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, Liberty Fund presents, for the first time in English, Francis Hutcheson's teachings regarding logic and metaphysics. The texts of A Compend of Logic and A Synopsis of Metaphysics represent Hutcheson's only systematic treatments of logic, ontology, and pneumatology, or the science of the soul, topics that were considered indispensable for the instruction of students in the eighteenth century. Originally composed in Latin, they were intended for classroom use and belong to a textbook tradition of commentary on the writings of others. James Moore states that "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.""--Jacket.

"On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows brings together the late essays, autobiographical reflections, an interview, and a poem by the eminent literary theorist and cultural critic Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). Burke was an innovative and original thinker who worked at the intersection of sociology, psychology, literary theology, and semiotics. This book, a selection of fourteen representative pieces of his productive later years, addresses many important themes Burke tackled throughout his career such as logology (his attempt to find a universal language theory and methodology), technology, and ecology. The essays also elaborate Burke's notions about creativity and its relation to stress, language and its literary uses, and the relation of mind and body."--Jacket.