Papers of John Laird relating to Alexander

This subgroup contains material belonging to Laird and material generated during his work as Alexander’s literary executor. It includes a series of letters from Alexander to Laird, material relating to Alexander’s will, obituaries, and papers generated during Laird’s preparation of Philosophical and Literary Pieces, the posthumous volume of Alexander’s work. There is also an important collection of reminiscences gathered by Laird from friends and acquaintances of Alexander during his research for a memoir of the philosopher. These contain a wealth of anecdotal and biographical information.

John Laird (1887-1946) came from Durris, Kincardineshire. He gained an M.A. in philosophy from Edinburgh University in 1908 and then moved to Cambridge University, where he was a senior scholar of Trinity College. After working in St Andrews University, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and Queen’s University in Belfast, he was appointed in 1924 as Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen, where he remained for the rest of his career. His special subject was moral philosophy, although he also wrote on metaphysics and published books on the history of philosophy. He was a friend of Samuel Alexander, with whom he carried on a long correspondence, and he was appointed Alexander’s literary executor on the latter’s death in 1938.