Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind

Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind recasts the cultivation of a democratic intellect in the late Scottish Enlightenment. It comprises an intellectual history of what was at stake in moral education during a transitional period of revolutionary change between 1772 and 1828. Stewart was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, who inherited the Scottish philosophical tradition of teaching metaphysics as moral philosophy from the tuition of Adam Ferguson andThomas Reid. But the Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture of his youth changed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Stewart sustained the Scottish school of philosophy by transforming how it was taught as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His elementary system of moraleducation fostered an empire of the mind in the universal pursuit of happiness. The democratization of Stewart's didactic Enlightenment—the instruction of moral improvement—in a globalizing, interconnected nineteenth-century knowledge economy is examined in this book.

Charles Bradford Bow is Lecturer in Modern History and Deputy Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the editor of Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment (OUP, 2018) and co-editor with Michael Brown of 525 Years in the Pursuit of Truth: A New History of the University of Aberdeen (AUP, 2022). His research on the intellectual history of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy has appearedin Modern Intellectual History, Scottish Historical Review, Historical Research, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, History of European Ideas, Intellectual History Review, and the Journal of Scottish Philosophy.