The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

This 1742 translation is a collaborative work by Francis Hutcheson and a colleague at Glasgow University, the classicist James Moor. Although Hutcheson was secretive about the extent of his work on the book, he was clearly the leading spirit of the project.

This influential classical work offers a vision of a universe governed by a natural law that obliges us to love mankind and to govern our lives in accordance with the natural order of things.

In many ways, Hutcheson and Moor’s The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is a companion volume to Hutcheson’s Latin work on ethics, released in the same year, Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria. In the latter volume, which is also available from Liberty Fund, Hutcheson continues a theme that proffered his ethics as a modern and, not least, Christianized version of Stoicism.

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he assumed the chair of moral philosophy in 1729.