 At the height of his powers, Hamilton was regarded as a major intellectual figure of international importance. In a memoir, Noah Porter, President of Yale, records that in America Hamilton “was regarded as the greatest writer and teacher among living Englishmen [sic!]”. Further evidence of this towering stature lies in the fact that a volume on Hamilton was included in the series Philosophical Classics, edited by William Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews. The inclusion ranked him alongside Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, Kant and Hegel. Such an estimation must now strike us as strange, yet there is point in asking why his times regarded him in such a favorable light. The answer has several sources. First there was his personal charisma and enormous erudition—‘possibly the most learned Scot that ever lived’ according to Alexander Campbell Fraser, his successor in the Chair at Edinburgh. Secondly, (as Porter records) by the early 19th century, a measure of intellectual exhaustion had set in in philosophical circles, and this provided a ready audience for his vigorous style of writing. Thirdly, there was his almost unique knowledge of German philosophy. Thanks to two trips he made to Germany during his years as a lawyer, Hamilton acquired an extensive knowledge of Kant and his immediate successors, little of which had been translated into English but which Hamilton was able to read in the original language. At the same time, he was not only thoroughly versed in the Scottish tradition of philosophy that he had acquired from Jardine and Mylne, but an enthusiastic exponent of Reid, whose collected works he edited and annotated extensively. He was thus perfectly placed to broaden the horizons of Scottish philosophy, to push it beyond the narrower confines of Common Sense by bringing to wider attention the importance of Kant, while doing so as one profoundly sympathetic to the native tradition. It is precisely for these reasons, in fact, that he is praised by John Veitch in the Philosophical Classics volume devoted to his philosophy.