Book dossier

An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue

by Francis Hutcheson, Wolfgang Leidhold, John Adams

"The Inquiry was written as a critical response to the work of Bernard Mandeville and as a defense of the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. It consists of two treatises exploring our aesthetic and our moral abilities. The first treatise argues that human beings possess a natural internal sense of beauty, whereas the second focuses on the "moral sense" that enables us to distinguish virtue from vice and thus to act from moral love or "benevolence.""--Jacket.