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FRANCIS HUTCHESON. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004. Pp. xxv + 257. $24; $12 (paper).
Francis Hutcheson. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004. Pp. xxiii + 226. $24; $12 (paper).
The most current mandate for reading Hutcheson's 1725 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue comes from the philosopher Peter Kivy. His The Seventh Sense (1975), which concentrates on the first treatise of the Inquiry (where Hutcheson is concerned with "Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design" as qualities that we are innately equipped to perceive), positions Hutcheson as the first theorist of aesthetics as we now understand it. Taking his methodological cues from Locke as a theorist of the mind, and his license to look at aesthetics from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson located the perceptual response to beautiful objects in the mind of the perceiver. Saying "X is beautiful" describes a feeling rather than X itself, a feeling that to some extent can be trained, can be connected with certain kinds...