George Davie

George Elder Davie, philosopher: born Dundee 18 March 1912; Lecturer in Philosophy, Queen's University, Belfast 1946-59; Lecturer in Philosophy, Edinburgh University 1959-82, Reader Emeritus 1987-2007; married 1944 Elspeth Dryer (died 1995; one daughter); died Sutton Veny, Wiltshire 20 March 2007.

At the centre of George Davie's celebrated first book, The Democratic Intellect, enthusiastically reviewed by C.P. Snow on its publication in 1961, is a thesis about liberal education - pursued by a micro-historical investigation of the culture and academic politics of Scotland's universities in the 19th century.

More than 40 years on, the book's discussions of the restriction of academic independence by centralisation, inter-university competition for prestige, research versus teaching and even versus scholarship, notions of abandoning moral discourse for ill-examined claims regarding scientific advance, are still relevant.

Davie, a career philosopher, believed philosophy's job was very much to mediate between the humanities/the ethical and the sciences. Philosophy had become too much a dispute between arts graduates either enthusing about or disdaining science, and neither knowing much about it nor having any very wide perspective.

George Davie was born in Dundee in 1912; his father was a pharmacist, his mother a schoolteacher. At Dundee High School he was offered and disdained a place at Oxford. Instead he attended Edinburgh University, where in 1935 he graduated MA with first class honours in Classics.

Some months before graduation, Davie first met Hugh MacDiarmid, not long since moved to Edinburgh. Davie's aspiring literary critic friend James Caird had sought out the admired poet and intellectual provocateur, and Davie's meeting began a lifelong friendship, like those they shared with, among others, Sorley MacLean, subsequently the great Gaelic poet.

Discussions at that time with MacDiarmid, MacLean and others in Davie's recollection sowed the seeds of much of his later work. Poetry remained important, Dunbar to MacDiarmid to Robert Garioch, another contemporary, whose Scots translations of George Buchanan's Latin he furthered, as well as rendering Scottish Latin verse into English for MacDiarmid's 1940 anthology The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry.

After he graduated, Davie's attention turned to philosophy. In 1939 he was appointed assistant to his teacher Norman Kemp Smith. After wartime service in the Signals Corps, he moved as lecturer in Philosophy to Queen's University, Belfast. He returned to Edinburgh in 1959, retiring in 1982, being in 1987 promoted Reader Emeritus. In 1995 Edinburgh followed Dundee in awarding him a doctorate honoris causa and in 1999 he received the Fletcher of Saltoun Award for services to Scotland.

His major project in Belfast was "The Scotch Metaphysics", accepted in 1953 for the degree DLitt at Edinburgh, but not published in book form until 2000. A deal of what was in it came through in his classroom teaching: on Hume and Berkeley, but also in mutually illuminating discussion of Scottish beside modern continental philosophy, bridged by awareness of Edmund Husserl's appropriations of Hume.

The Swede Torgny Segerstedt's work on 19th-century Scottish philosophers had inspired Davie in the 1930s, and Davie explored the Scottish consideration of perception from Hume to J.F. Ferrier in the 1850s, eliciting ideas of current importance. He also drew on the work in a published critique of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) when that work was called a classic and the apotheosis of analytic philosophy.

One of Davie's last students, the gifted Paul Tomassi (tragically dead two years before him), wrote of an intimacy with the detail of Hume's debates with contemporaries which made it hard to believe Davie hadn't been eavesdropping in 18th-century Edinburgh. A major purpose of studying Scottish philosophy as Scottish philosophy was for Davie reminders of the practical and public questions whose need of resolution warranted the more complex technical considerations of academia.

The publisher's request in 1953 for an introduction to provide the philosophical discussions with a historical context stalled publication of The Scotch Metaphysics. The introduction became The Democratic Intellect, which he published as George Elder Davie.

Despite its general application, Davie's first book has been both lauded and damned as a nationalist tract. His neglect of sympathetic endeavours in England modelled on Scottish universities could have been remedied by footnoting, but his concern was with Scottish universities as what they were, not merely with their having been Scottish. A chapter excluded by Edinburgh University Press, on Davie's hero the St Andrews classicist and educationist John Burnet, could have provided an international context. Burnet was also a representative of Benjamin Jowett's Balliol.

In the 1960s Davie suffered health problems, and belatedly diagnosed glaucoma seriously impaired his eyesight, which he finally lost.

A mid-1970s sabbatical in Australia, in Sydney assisting with the archived papers of John Anderson, Scottish "Father of Australian Philosophy", kindled consciousness of Anderson's public in the open spaces where professors were professors. Davie's second book, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (1986), on liberal education, philosophy and public intellectual life in 20th-century Scotland, helps remedy the previous omission of Burnet, recognises Anderson's enthusiasm for his work, and refers to the autodidact MacDiarmid as public intellectual.

Subsequently two small volumes of essays appeared, then in 2000 The Scotch Metaphysics, and finally a small monograph on J.F. Ferrier, Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment (2003), amplifying themes in The Democratic Intellect.

By the time widespread interest in the Scottish Enlightenment had burgeoned, around 1980, Davie had moved on to other things. The functions performed by the 18th-century Scottish intelligentsia remained however a constant reference, maintained by Blackwood's and other 19th-century journals, resumed by MacDiarmid, and crucial to a free community.

Davie was himself no public man, modestly sociable, not excessively organised or footnote-conscious, but hugely knowledgeable: as a colleague recalled, you asked, he disclaimed expertise, but half an hour later he was still talking and you still learning. He had a generous wit, the most wholehearted laugh, and a sense of humour sometimes startlingly broad.

In 1998 he was recognisably the man Elspeth Dryer described in her diary 60 years before. They married in 1944. As Elspeth Davie she earned considerable respect as a writer of fiction, dying in 1995 of long-term effects of a major stroke. George Davie himself died two days after his 95th birthday. His last two years had been spent in Wiltshire, living near their daughter.

Robert R. Calder