Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Counsels of Sound Reason
Short moral essays on virtue, happiness and reason, written for a broad readership in a language close to spoken Serbian.
Introduction
The “Counsels of Sound Reason” appeared in Leipzig in 1784, a year after the first part of “Life and Adventures”. The book consists of moral essays on virtue, happiness, reason and the conduct of life, written for readers without schooling in philosophy. Obradović draws on the moral philosophy of the German and English Enlightenment and on ancient authors, adapting rather than translating them, and illustrates his precepts with examples from everyday life. His guiding idea is that reason and virtue lead to happiness and that both can be learned. Written in a language close to the vernacular, the book helped to form a Serbian reading public and is counted among the first works of moral philosophy in Serbian.
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