1769–1828 · Scottish diplomat, MP and sceptical philosopher
William Drummond of Logiealmond was baptised in September 1769 and died in March 1828, and spent his working life in politics and diplomacy rather than philosophy: MP for St Mawes and then Lostwithiel, envoy to Naples, and briefly ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. His serious intellectual work was done alongside all that, and Academical Questions (1805) is the book that matters here — a defence of philosophical scepticism in the line of David Hume, and a text that helped shape the young Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was a Fellow of the Royal Societies of both London and Edinburgh, and is now remembered almost entirely for one sentence in that book’s preface — a sentence that usually appears under somebody else’s name.