Leçons de Logique. by FORTUNATO DE FELICE, Count di Panzutti,…

First Edition. Two volumes, 8vo (173 x 105 mm), pp. [ii], 370; [ii], [3]-282, [1], some light browning in text, in contemporary blue boards, surface a little rubbed, paper manuscript labels on spines.

A fascinating educational work on logic written in French by the Italian nobleman Fortunato de Felice, philosopher, scientist, leading publisher (he founded the Typographic Society of Bern as well as the press at Yverdon) and pioneer of education in Switzerland. A prolific writer on many subjects, he is chiefly remembered for the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon, which grew out of the educational establishment for young people that he had founded in 1762 at the same time as the printing press. As well as editing the encyclopaedia, he contributed more than 800 articles to it on a wide variety of philosophical, theological and scientific subjects. He wrote a number of educational works of considerable importance and also translated numerous authors including Descartes, d’Alembert, Newton and Maupertuis into Italian as well as works by Burlamaqui, Albrecht von Haller, Winckleman and many others into French.
Fortunato de Felice’s Leçons de Logique, which are suitably arranged into a logical array of parts, chapters and sub-divisions, present a kind of manual of rational thought: in its 28 clearly-presented lessons, it has been much praised as one of the best examples of this genre in French. ‘Il est assez singulier que nous soyons redevables à un étranger de la meilleure logique que nous ayons en françois’ (Elie Fréron, cited in Perret, Les Imprimeries d’Yverdon aux XVII et XVIIIe siècle, p. 188).
This work was printed at Fortunato de Felice’s own press in Yverdon in the same year that the first two volumes of his 48 volume Encyclopédie d’Yverdon were published.

Catalogue de l’Imprimerie de F.-B. de Félice, no. 65 (in Perret, Les Imprimeries d’Yverdon aux XVII et XVIIIe siècle, p. 404).

Outside Continental Europe, OCLC lists only Ushaw College and Columbia.