Abstract

In the last fifty years, increasing general and scholarly attention has been paid to Francis Hutcheson, usually referred to as “the father of Scottish Enlightenment.” In the English-speaking world, scholars have profited from a number of facsimile reprints of Hutcheson’s works, as well as from P. Kivy’s modern edition of the Inquiry on Beauty. In the last fifteen years the Inquiry on Virtue has been translated into German, both the Inquiries into French, the Inquiries as well the Essay on Passions, Illustrations and the Letters between G. Burnet and Hutcheson into Italian. All these translations supply the variants found in different editions and provide readers with a number of aids. Their editors seem to share, to a greater or lesser extent, the idea that a text of the past is, first of all, an historical document to be respected in its integrity and to be understood in its historical context. This idea is also gaining credit in the English-speaking world, as is shown by the recent proliferation of critical editions of Hume’s, Smith’s and Reid’s works. Of course, there are opponents to this idea: it seems that historical integrity and readability of a text of the past are often considered to be in opposition.