Fordyce David (1711–51), Scottish philosopher and educational theorist whose writings were influential in the eighteenth century. His lectures formed the basis of his Elements of Moral Philosophy, written originally for The Preceptor (1748), later translated into German and French, and abridged for the articles on moral philosophy in the first Encylopaedia Britannica (1771). Fordyce combines the preacher’s appeal to the heart in the advocacy of virtue with a moral ‘scientist’s’ appraisal of human psychology. He claims to derive our duties experimentally from a study of the prerequisites of human happiness. M.A.St.