Thomas Davidson (philosopher)
Encyclopedia
Thomas Davidson was a Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

-American philosopher and lecturer.

Biography

Davidson was born of Presbyterian parents at Old Deer, near Aberdeen
Aberdeen
Aberdeen is Scotland's third most populous city, one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas and the United Kingdom's 25th most populous city, with an official population estimate of ....

. After graduating from Aberdeen University (1860) as first graduate and Greek prizeman, he held the position of rector of the grammar school of Old Aberdeen (1860-1863). From 1863 until 1866, he was master in several English schools, spending his vacations on the continent. In 1866 he moved to Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, to occupy a place in the London Collegiate Institute. In the following year, he came to the United States, and, after spending some months in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, moved to St. Louis, where, in addition to work on the New York Round Table and the Western Educational Monthly, he was classical master in the St. Louis high school, and subsequently principal of one of the branch high schools.

In 1875, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

. He travelled extensively, and became a proficient linguist, acquiring a knowledge of French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Latin, and Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

.

In Greece, he devoted himself mainly to archaeology and modern Greek. He wrote Fragments of Parmenides
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides...

(1869). In Italy, he studied the Catholic Church, scholastic philosophy, Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

, and Rosmini
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati
Blessed Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was an Italian Roman Catholic priest and philosopher. He founded the Rosminians, officially the Institute of Charity or Societas a charitate nuncupata.-Biography:...

. For studying the Catholic Church, unusual opportunities were thrown open to him, chiefly through the Princess Carolyne of Sayn-Wittgenstein and Cardinal Hohenlohe, who offered him an apartment in his episcopal palace at Albano
Albano
Albano may refer to:geography*Albano di Lucania, comune in the province of Potenza, Italy*Albano Laziale, comune in the province of Rome, Italy*Lake Albano, lake in Italy*Albano Sant'Alessandro, comune in the province of Bergamo, Italy...

, and also in the villa D'Este at Tivoli
Tivoli
The name Tivoli originally indicates the town of Tivoli in the Lazio region of central Italy, founded a few centuries before Rome. Because of the fame of the gardens of the Villa d'Este there , the name has also been applied to other entities:-Gardens, theatres and venues:* Jardin de Tivoli,...

. His interest in Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...

 having come to the ears of the pope through Bishop (later Cardinal) Schiatlino, he was invited to the Vatican, where the holy father suggested that he should settle in Rome and aid his professors in editing the new edition of St. Thomas. For more than a year he lived at Domodossola
Domodossola
Domodossola is a city and comune in the Province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, in the region of Piedmont, northern Italy...

, in Piedmont, where the Institute of Charity, founded by Rosmini
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati
Blessed Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was an Italian Roman Catholic priest and philosopher. He founded the Rosminians, officially the Institute of Charity or Societas a charitate nuncupata.-Biography:...

, has its novitiate. Here he produced the work that first brought Rosmini to the notice of English-speaking students: The Philosophical System of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, translated, with a Sketch of the Author's Life, Bibliography, Introduction, and Notes (London, 1882). At the same time he wrote essays on classical subjects, mainly archaeological, published under the title The Parthenon Frieze and Other Essays (London, 1882). He also translated Rosmini's Psychology (3 vols., London, 1884). In 1883, he occupied a villa in Capri, and there translated Rosmini's Anthropology. Davidson was a frequent contributor to periodicals, and delivered courses of lectures, before the Lowell Institute
Lowell Institute
The Lowell Institute is an educational foundation in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., providing for free public lectures, and endowed by the bequest of $250,000 left by John Lowell, Jr., who died in 1836. Under the terms of his will 10% of the net income was to be added to the principal, which in...

 in Boston and elsewhere, on modern Greece, on Greek sculpture, etc. He was mainly instrumental in founding “The Fellowship of the New Life,” which had branches in London and New York.

Davidson's most successful work was in connection with the Educational Alliance in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, where he attained wide popularity by a series of lectures on sociology. A special class was formed for Jewish young men and women, whom he introduced to the great writers on sociology and their problems. He aimed at founding among them what he called a "Breadwinners' College," but his work was cut short by his sudden death in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

, Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

.

Apeirotheism

Thomas Davidson taught a philosophy called Apeirotheism, it has been described as a "form of pluralistic idealism...coupled with a stern ethical rigorism..." Increasingly, he preferred to identify his philosophy as Apeirotheism, an appellation he defined as "a theory of Gods infinite in number." The theory was indebted to Aristotle's pluralism and his concepts of the soul and Nous. Aristotle's "soul" is the rational, living aspect of a living substance and cannot exist apart from the body because it is not a substance, but rather an essence; Nous is rational thought and understanding. Davidson argued that Aristotle's Nous identified God with rational thought, and that God could not exist apart from the world just as the Aristotlean soul could not exist apart from the body. Thus Davidson grounded an immanent Emersonian World Soul in a sophisticated Aristotelian metaphysics.

Though initially a panentheist, Davidson's studies in Domodossola—including the work of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, Leibniz, Kant, and Rosmini—led him to a panpsychistic monadology, a theory that reality consists of an infinite number of mental or spiritual substances, each with an Aristotelian telos. Human psyches are unique however, because they possess autonomy, which provides the potential to become divine through proper, moral association with other human psyches. This allowed Davidson to reject pantheism, which, he reasoned, led to a God "scattered through the universe...so that the total Absolute exists only in the sum of things taken together." Rather, Davidson argued, God exists everywhere, but he "exists fully or completely" in each monad. Reality is a Göttergemeinschaft, a society of gods; metaphysical, social and spiritual unity is moral rather than ontological.

Davidson's religious philosophy had important consequences for social thought. Apeirotheism was utterly democratic and perfectionistic because it entailed that each individual has the potential to be a God, although restrictive social relations have thwarted the development of most people's potential. For Davidson, because we contain the divine within us, our unfettered natural instincts would impel us to act morally. As individuals became increasingly aware of the divine within themselves, so they became increasingly moral. James believed this individualistic religion made Davidson "indifferent...to socialisms and general administrative panaceas." According to James, Davidson taught that "Life must be flexible. You ask for a free man and these Utopias give you an interchangeable part, with a fixed number, in a rule-bound social organism." Apeirotheism called for the release of each individual's potential divinity through self-cultivation and the nurturing of others rather than through changes in one's material conditions. Davidson was convinced that this release would lead to the only true reform of human society; it was to this task that he devoted the rest of his life.

External links

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