Dugald Stewart was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1786 until his death in 1828, and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, the period in the late-18th and early-19th century when Scotland in general, and Edinburgh in particular, was the great intellectual powerhouse of European thought and ideas. Besides philosophy, fields that advanced dramatically as a result of the Scottish Enlightenment include political economy, engineering, architecture, medicine, geology, archaeology, botany and zoology, law, agriculture, chemistry and sociology.
This memorial was commissioned by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1830 and completed in September the following year. The design, by William Henry Playfair, is based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, Greece, and is a circular temple of nine fluted Corinthian columns around an elevated urn, on a circular podium. It was granted category A listing in April 1966, and is one of the best known structures in Edinburgh, appearing in many thousands of images of the city.