Jorge López Lloret is professor of Aesthetics and Arts Theory at the University of Seville (Spain). He is specialized in the philosophy and aesthetics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially the French and Scottish Enlightenment. He has published articles on Adam Smith, René Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. He has also translated into Spanish and critically edited Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages, from which the present investigation has emerged.