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Biography

Dr Bradford Bow is an intellectual historian of Britain, Scotland, and America during the long eighteenth century, with a broader interest in the global contexts of Enlightenment intellectual and moral culture. Dr Bow completed a PhD in the fields of Enlightenment History and Scottish Diaspora Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. During the 2012-13 academic year, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and an adjunct lecturing position at Edinburgh University. At that time, he also served as the Acting Director of the MSc Intellectual History programme and organised research activities for the Carnegie Trust funded project ‘Scotland’s Trans-Atlantic Relations’ (STAR). Following this, he held the inaugural Jack Miller Center-Huntington Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Dr Bow returned to the University of Edinburgh during the 2013-14 academic year as a Teaching Fellow in Enlightenment History and Deputy Director of the MSc Intellectual History programme. Afterwards, he was an Assistant Professor of Global Intellectual History at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) between 2014 and 2019. Dr Bow joined the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy in August 2019. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and Distinguished Shinhan Professor at Yonsei University.

Research Overview

My research interests centre on the global intellectual history of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy during the long eighteenth century (1660-1840). From a transnational and global perspective, I address questions concerning the conception, diffusion, and reception of the Scottish philosophical tradition of teaching metaphysics as moral philosophy, applied ethics, and political economy. A connecting thread across this work is the question of what constituted a liberal education and how arguments for it were developed, contested, and instituted.  

Current Research

Two book projects now carry my work on Scottish philosophy outward into the wider American and British imperial contexts.

An Enlightenment Science of Race: Scotland and the American Philosophical Society, 1743–1899 has developed from two recent articles, 'Becoming White in the American Enlightenment' (2024) and 'Witherspoon and Beattie on the Philosophy of Common Sense Abolitionism' (2025), into a large-scale study of the rise and displacement of a Scottish science of race within America's oldest learned society. I argue that the common sense account of a universal human nature which Franklin, Jefferson, Witherspoon, Stanhope Smith and Rush drew from Scotland was hollowed out by the polygenism of the ‘American School’ and superseded after Darwin by an evolutionary anthropology that no longer appealed to Scottish thought.

Scotland's Imperial Enlightenment, drawn from eight years of archival research, examines Scottish contributions to metaphysical philology in the philosophical and literary societies of Madras, Bengal and Bombay between roughly 1784 and 1857. I argue that anatomists of the mind treated foreign philosophical systems and the political economy of imperial management as joined, and that the comparison across these three societies reveals the reach of Scottish Enlightenment thought during its supposed decline.

Past Research

James Beattie: An Intellectual Biography, forthcoming in the Introductions Series of Aberdeen University Press in 2027, follows one member of the Wise Club through the shared inquiry my second book set out. Posterity remembers Beattie, when it remembers him at all, as the poet of The Minstrel, the author of a once-celebrated polemic against Hume, and a member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. However, these areas of interest have rarely been read as the record of one man. The book argues that they were one undertaking. The cultivation of common sense, which Beattie understood as a moral and pedagogical principle rather than a narrowly epistemological one, was pursued in verse for as long as verse would carry it, in his lectures, and in print at intervals. Drawing on his manuscript lectures at Marischal College, the surviving record of his discourses to the Wise Club, the unpublished Castle of Scepticism and his treatise on slavery, and the seven hundred letters his first biographer never printed, it follows Beattie from the years that brought him to the chair of moral philosophy and logic in 1760 to the editorial decisions made on his papers in the year after his death, which first divided the poet from the philosopher and the philosopher from the teacher.

Building on a podcast series that I coordinated, my co-edited volume with Michael Brown, Foundations and Disruptions: A New History of Aberdeen University, is forthcoming with Aberdeen University Press in 2027. It explores the University's transnational transmission of ideas since the foundation of King's.

My second book, The Wise Club: Origins of Common Sense in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 1758–1773, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026, reconstructs the collaborative intellectual culture in which the Scottish philosophy of common sense first emerged in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society between 1758 and 1773. Rather than attributing this school of thought to a single founder, the book traces how David Skene, John Gregory, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie developed distinct yet compatible lines of enquiry across different branches of knowledge through a disciplined culture of inquiry. Their collective commitment to an inductive investigation of the original faculties of the human mind extended common sense beyond epistemology to natural history, medicine, rhetoric, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and imaginative literature. Drawing on unpublished discourses, abstracted discussions, lecture notes, and correspondence, it situates the Wise Club in a formative context that produced canonical works of the Scottish Enlightenment and reinterprets common sense philosophy as a characteristic method of inquiry rather than a unified doctrinal system.

My first monograph, Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind, published by Oxford University Press in August 2022, sets forth a new understanding of the late Scottish Enlightenment in its transatlantic contexts. It comprises an intellectual history of what was at stake in moral education during a transitional period of revolutionary change in Scottish intellectual culture and within a globalising knowledge economy between 1772 and 1828. Seminal works in this field identify continuity of thought in the 'spirit' of a distinctive Scottish school of philosophy and a cross-generational 'democratic intellect' that took shape through the Scottish philosophical tradition in higher education. However, the legacy of Scottish philosophy in nineteenth-century education is largely misunderstood due to the scholarly marginalisation of Stewart's educational doctrine. My book argues that Stewart's novel and historically significant systematic approach to lifelong education democratised the Scottish Enlightenment pattern of philosophical thinking in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and reformed the moral economy of the British imperial world.

My edited volume, Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment, published by Oxford University Press in 2018, established a new understanding of the most influential philosophical system in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Teaching Responsibilities

Areas of PG Supervision

I welcome approaches from prospective postgraduate students with an interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish, British, American, Atlantic, Global, and Enlightenment History.