Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind. Francis Hutcheson

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      © 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

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      CONTENTS

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgments

A Compend of Logic

Dissertation on the Origin of Philosophy and Its Principal Founders and Exponents

Prolegomena

PART I. On Apprehension

PART II. On the Noetic Judgment and the Proposition

PART III. On Discourse

       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

INTRODUCTION

      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 of Hutcheson and his colleagues. One was the logic of ideas: the logic of Port Royal as in The Art of Thinking by Arnauld and Nicole (1662), Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and Jean Le Clerc’s Logica; sive Ars Ratiocinandi (1692). The second approach was the logic of Aristotelian scholasticism: the texts that appear to have been most often consulted were those of Franco Burgersdijk, Institutiones Logicae (1632), Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendium (1672), and Henry Aldrich, Artis Logicae Compendium (1692).

      In Hutcheson’s A Compend of Logic (Logicae Compendium, 1756), the logic of ideas provided the structure and point of departure for his exposition. His first concern, which he shared with the logicians of Port Royal, Locke and Le Clerc, was to account for the formation of ideas: how ideas are conceived or apprehended (Part I); how judgments are formed by