Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Institutes of Moral Philosophy
Textbook of his Edinburgh lectures on human nature, the mind, and moral and political law; Christian Garve’s German translation of 1772 (“Grundsätze der Moralphilosophie”) made Ferguson known to German readers, among them Hegel.
Introduction
Ferguson published the “Institutes of Moral Philosophy” in Edinburgh in 1769 as a compact textbook for his students. In numbered paragraphs it covers the natural history of man, the theory of mind, the knowledge of God, moral laws, jurisprudence and politics. Christian Garve translated it into German in 1772 with his own commentary as “Grundsätze der Moralphilosophie”, and in this form it was widely read in Germany, among others by Hegel. Ferguson later expanded its material into his “Principles of Moral and Political Science” (1792).
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