Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Thomas Brown

The bio below comes from a published article and may now be dated.

Thomas Brown

Thomas Brown (1778–1820) was a Scottish philosopher and poet. As a teenager studying at Edinburgh under Dugald Stewart, he took to metaphysics and pondered moral and men­tal experience as psychological or physiological phenomena. At age 20 he published a challenge to Erasmus Darwin’s materialism. Brown studied medicine, participated in the early years of the Edinburgh Review, published poetry, and wrote on Hume’s views of causality. Beginning in 1808 Brown assisted Stewart and then co-occupied the moral philosophy chair at Edinburgh, where he developed lectures that students found captivating. But Brown did not enjoy a solid esteem among his peers. In 1820, the year of his death at age 42, he published several works, including his four-volume Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, from which an extract is here presented.