James Hutton’s epistemological treatise
I present here copies of all three volumes of James Hutton’s, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge. I will have much more to say on this work later. For now, I’ll note that it is in these volumes that Hutton explicitly lays out the epistemological principles that ostensibly motivated his revolutionary uniformitarian views in geology. This work has for a long time been difficult to obtain in a format suitable for academic use. By posting these PDF copies, I am hoping to offer other scholars the chance to pay the work its due attention. If you find errors in the files or problems with specific pages, please let me know. I’ll do my best to fix them.
Attribution: The work reproduced in these files is in the public domain. These PDFs were created using images provided by the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia (see the first page of each file for a citation and link to the source images).
Thank you for posting these.