Dugald Stewart

Dugald Stewart FRS FRSE (/ˈdjuːɡəld/; 22 November 1753 – 11 June 1828) was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment, he was renowned as a populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and of Adam Smith. Trained in mathematics, medicine and philosophy, his lectures at the University of Edinburgh were widely disseminated by his many influential students. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In most contemporary documents he is referred to as Prof Dougal Stewart.

He was the son of Matthew Stewart (1715–1785), professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh (1747–1772), and was born in his father's quarters at Old College. His mother was Marjory Stewart, his father's cousin.^{[citation needed]}

He was educated at the High School and the University of Edinburgh, where he studied mathematics and moral philosophy under Adam Ferguson. In 1771, in the hope of gaining a Snell Exhibition Scholarship and proceeding to Oxford to study for the English Church, he went to the University of Glasgow to attend the classes of Thomas Reid. To Reid he later owed his theory of morality. In Glasgow, Stewart boarded in the same house as Archibald Alison, author of the Essay on Taste, and a lasting friendship sprang up between them.

After a single session in Glasgow University, at the age of nineteen, Dugald was asked by his father, whose health was beginning to fail, to give his mathematical classes in the University of Edinburgh. After three years there, in 1775, Dugald was elected joint professor of mathematics in conjunction with his father. Three years later Ferguson was appointed secretary to the commissioners sent out to the American colonies, and at his request Stewart lectured as his substitute during the session 1778–1779, delivering an original course of lectures on morals. In his early years he was influenced by Lord Monboddo, with whom he corresponded.

In 1785 Stewart succeeded Ferguson in the chair of moral philosophy, which he filled for twenty-five years, making it a centre of intellectual and moral influence. Young men were attracted by his reputation from England, Europe and America. Greatly influenced by the Irish Presbyterian Francis Hutcheson who, in the preceding generation, had held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Stewart's course on moral philosophy embraced, besides ethics proper, lectures on political philosophy or the theory of government.

William Drennan, whose father Thomas Drennan had been secretary to Hutcheson, and who 1791 moved the formation of the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast and in Dublin, was a student and friend. It is from Stewart that Drennan is said to have "imbibed the classical tradition of republican theory, in its most famous English embodiment in the works of John Locke, and its contemporary reincarnation in the works of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley".

Stewart's dissident rationalism greatly influenced Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Hamilton. They drew extensively on his work in constructing educational programmes that rested on the assumption that women, and especially mothers, were intellectually capable of understanding the importance of the early association of ideas in the training of children's emotions and reasoning powers.

Stewart spent the summers of 1788 and 1789 in France, where he met Suard, Degérando, and Raynal, and came to sympathise with the revolutionary movement. His political teaching, after the French Revolution, drew suspicion on him. His Edinburgh residence for several years was Whitefoord House on the Royal Mile.