Alexander Campbell Fraser

Rev Prof Alexander Campbell Fraser, FRSE DCL LLD D.Litt. (3 September 1819 – 2 December 1914) was a Scottish philosopher.

He was born in the manse at Ardchattan, Argyll, the son of the parish minister, Rev Hugh Fraser, and hius wife, Maria Helen Campbell. He was the eldest of twelve children.

Due to ill-health he was educated by his mother then sent to Glasgow aged 14 to study Divinity at the University of Glasgow under Prof James Mylne. However, he did not find Glasgow to his liking as a city and stayed there only one year. He completed his studies at University of Edinburgh, graduating at Divinity Hall in 1843. This was a tumultuous year in the Scottish church and Fraser decided to join the Free Church following the Disruption. He was ordained in 1844 and became minister of the small parish of Cramond on the Firth of Forth just on the outer edge of Edinburgh. Remaining in Edinburgh he succeeded Sir William Hamilton as Professor of Logic at New College in 1846 and remained in this role until 1856.

He edited the North British Review from 1850 to 1857, and in 1856, having previously been a Free Church of Scotland minister, he succeeded Sir William Hamilton as professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University. In 1859 he became Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the university and retained this role for 30 years.

In 1831 Sir William Hamilton was appointed to the chair of Logic and Metaphysics, and Fraser became his pupil. He himself said "I owe more to Hamilton than to any other influence." It was about this time also that he began his study of Berkeley and Coleridge, and deserted his early phenomenalism for the conception of a spiritual will as the universal cause. In the Biographia this "Theistic faith" appears in its full development (see the concluding chapter), and is especially important as perhaps the nearest approach to Kantian ethics made by original English philosophy. Apart from the philosophical interest of the Biographia, the work contains valuable pictures of the Lam of Lorne and Argyllshire society in the early 19th century, of university life in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and a history of the North British Review.

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