Francis Hutcheson: An Important Irish Contributor to Eighteenth-Century Psychological Thought

Abstract

Of all Irish writers, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) has arguably made the greatest contribution to the historical development of psychology. As a ‘never-to-be-forgotten’ teacher and a writer of books of solidworth, his influence was widely felt in the eighteenth century both as an innovator and a popularizer of psychological ideas. These views had been developed to serve as a foundation for discussions of those fields in which his major interests lay, ethics and aesthetics. Seldom a doctrinaire thinker, Hutcheson was a faculty theorist who also wrote positively about the association of ideas. An advocate of empiricism, he also attempted to mathematize his psychology. Ranging far beyond the epistemology which has so often been identified with eighteenth-century psychology, Hutcheson delved deeply into questions of motivation and social interaction.