Sir William James Charles Maria Drummond of LogiealmondFRSFRSE DCL (bapt. 26 September 1769[1] – 29 March 1828) was a Scottish diplomat and Member of Parliament, poet and philosopher. His book Academical Questions (1805) is arguably important in the development of the ideas of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Drummond lived in London from 1809 and died in Rome on 29 March 1828.
In 1803, he became British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.[6] Appointed by the Levant Company on 14 January 1803, he arrived at the Dardanelles the following May. He was there for less than a year and then he returned to England in 1804. From 1806 to 1809 he served as Envoy to the Court of Naples for a second time. He was knighted in 1813 or 1814.[7]
The Argument of Academical Questions
The title of Drummond's book refers to the laterPlatonic Academy, which was, in fact, not so much Platonist as Sceptical in orientation, based on the work of Pyrrho the Sceptic and later followers of Pyrrho such as Carneades. Academical Questions is a work in the Sceptic tradition, in this case influenced by the Sceptical Scottish philosopher David Hume.
According to C.E. Pulos's 1954 book, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism, Drummond uses Sceptical Humean ideas in an attempt to refute the British philosophy predominant in his day, the Common Sense ideas of Thomas Reid and his followers. These had been enunciated first in Reid's An Enquiry into the Human Mind (1765). The quotation, "He, who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave" has been credited to Drummond.[8]
^...ambassador to the Court of Naples 1801-3; to the Ottoman Porte 1803-6; to the Court of Naples for the second time, 1806-9.[1]; this reference also gives opinions by Lord Byron.