Essays on Philosophical Subjects.

Notes

First Dublin edition, same year as the first London edition; Kress lists the Dublin printing first and calls the London "another issue" while Tribe calls the Dublin edition a piracy. The Essays were published five years after Smith's death and edited by the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753-1828); his "Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith" is one of the earliest biographical notices of Smith and "until Stewart's Biographical Memoir of 1811 formed the basis upon which everyone drew for the biographies of Smith that began to appear in the early nineteenth century" (Tribe). The editors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, state that Smith's essays were intended as parts of "a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts", but that Smith "long since found it necessary to abandon that plan as far too extensive". The essays range over philosophy, aesthetics and the history of science. Most were probably written before the appearance of the Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, but were withheld from publication as part of Smith's "extensive plan". Scarce: neither Einaudi nor Goldsmiths' list this Dublin edition.