Best known for his attack on the speculative and stylistic excesses of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), Francis Bowen was an outspoken opponent of philosophical and literary Transcendentalism during the controversial defining years of the movement between 1836 and 1842. A Unitarian and younger admirer of Andrews Norton, Bowen worked hard to rise into the Harvard establishment and then to defend Unitarian social and intellectual values against forces that threatened them. He was a fixture in Harvard philosophy for thirty-six years, contributing to the University Lectures for graduate students in 1869-1870, along with such men as Emerson, John Fiske, and Frederic Henry Hedge, and serving as an important, if little acknowledged, influence on his more famous students and colleagues Chauncey Wright, Charles Peirce, and William James.

Francis Bowen was born on 8 September 1811 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to Dijah and Elizabeth (Flint) Bowen. Educated at the Mayhew Grammar School in Boston, Francis clerked...