Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen can be traced back to the foundation of King’s College
King's College
in 1495, Hector Boice, its first Rector or Principal being himself a philosopher at Paris. The founding charter of 1505 established five positions which included a teacher of philosophy (as well as, unusually, a ‘mediciner’) . Almost one hundred years later in 1593 a second university level institution - Marischal College - was created in Aberdeen. It too had a teacher of philosophy. The University of Aberdeen was created by the unification of the two colleges in 1860.
Both King’s and Marischal originally used the system of Regents by which a single teacher took one class through the complete four year curriculum, though often specializing to some extent in one subject. In the course of the 18th century the Scottish universities were reformed, and all moved to a professoriate system in which each teacher specialized in just one subject which he then taught to all years. Though the Regius Chair of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen is normally said to date back to the foundation of 1505, its most distinguished philosopher - Thomas Reid - was Regent, not Professor. The first person in Aberdeen to go by the title ‘Professor of Moral Philosophy’ was Robert Eden Scott in 1802, seventy five years after Gersholm Carmichael, Regent at Glasgow, became the first occupant of the Chair of Moral Philosophy which Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid subsequently occupied
Aberdeen University
.
Marischal College also established a Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic, its most famous occupant being James Beattie. With the merger of the two colleges in 1860, the titles were separated, and both given the status of Regius Chairs i.e. professorships filled by Royal appointment. The Regius Chair of Logic thus dates from 1860, and for the first 20 years was occupied by Alexander Bain, founder of the journal Mind and an important contributor to the development of psychology as a strictly empirical inquiry.