Defending Didactic Enlightenment, 1805−1815

Abstract This chapter examines Stewart’s defence of his didactic Enlightenment. In the contexts of Leslie affair of 1805−6, which harboured an ecclesiastical counter-revolutionary attack against the Scottish philosophical tradition, Stewart defended the utility of his educational doctrine. He went on to confront competing philosophical systems in the revived republic of letters after his triumph over Edinburgh clergymen with the support of his intellectual disciples in the Edinburgh Review. Stewart ridiculed Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and John Horne Tooke’s ‘etymological metaphysics’ in his Philosophical Essays (1810), which cleared the way for his rational logic of moral education that he set forth in the second volume of his Elements (1814). And the development of an experimental programme of education for a boy, who was born blind and deaf, exhibited the wider democratization of Stewart’s didactic Enlightenment.