A tenant farmer who resided at Lennel Hill Farm, near Coldstream, Berwickshire, he was one of several philosophers active in the borders area of Scotland during this period.
Other figures in this group include Andrew Baxter, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and most importantly David Hume.
These charges encouraged the local clergy in the presbytery of Chirnside to prosecute Dudgeon on the ground that he was the author of a work that ‘contains many gross errors subversive of Christianity’.
By way of alternative he defended a form of pantheistic immaterialism that blended the views of George Berkeley and Spinoza, along with a moral sense ethics in line with Shaftesbury.
Some years later John Witherspoon, in his satirical work 'Ecclesiastical Characteristics' (maxim 4), mentioned Dudgeon along with a number of thinkers, including Shaftesbury, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Collins, and Kames, whose ideas had been influential on the ‘moderate’ party in the Church of Scotland.