The first of the essays collected here begins with a brief analysis of some philosophical problems circulating in the 17th to 18th centuries, which may have had some influence on the formation of Francis Hutcheson. For the purpose of analysing the latter's thought, an exposition schema is identified in the work of the Scottish philosopher, the Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order Harmony, Design. Following this schema, a distinction is first made between simple and complex pleasures, and then there is an examination of Hutcheson's sentimentalist conception, linked to the theory of inner sense. Once Hutcheson's axiological positions are established, one necessarily finds oneself talking about the problems connected with relativism in matters of taste and about how Hutcheson denies and combats the scepticism deriving from it.
Only after these analyses of the conceptions present in the Inquiry can the fundamental nucleus of the essay be approached. An exposition of the main results of Hutcheson's teleology is followed by an examination of the close links existing between his theory of beauty and his moral theory, links which open up an overall sphere of valuation. This axiological domain is opposed to the cognitive field of philosophy by means of an antithesis posited by Hutcheson himself. Indeed, two cognitive modes are distinguished: that proper for the poet and that of the virtuoso. If the latter mode corresponds to the model of scientific, analytic and reductive research, the former mode describes the possibility of knowledge which is global and attentive to values. But, above all, from all this we get the vision of a superiority of axiological research to theoreticalspeculative investigations.
The second essay analyses the relations existing between Hutcheson's research on beauty and the article Beau written by Diderot for the Encyclopédie. Starting from the observation that a lot of ideas and passages in the Inquiry were used by Diderot, an endeavour is made to detect the causes of certain modifications or additions that he made to the passages taken from Hutcheson's book. This shows up the fact that there exist major affinities between the two aesthetic theories regarding particular results, but also that there are important divergences between the general philosophical conceptions of the two authors. This observation may explain Diderot's ambiguous attitude towards Hutcheson's theory of beauty.