The philosopher Felmon Davis passed away at the age of 76 on May 7, 2025 in his adopted home of Mannheim, Germany. Before his retirement in 2018, he was Professor of Philosophy at Union College, Schenectady, NY. He grew up in Philadelphia and attended Haverford College. This is where he met Richard Bernstein and was first introduced to the thought of Jürgen Habermas. After taking his BA at Haverford with distinction, he went on to Princeton to do his PhD with Richard Rorty. In 1974-75, he spent a year in Munich to engage with the researchers at the Starnberg Max Planck Institute during Habermas’ tenure there. After Rorty had departed for the University of Virginia, Davis completed his thesis under the supervision of Raymond Geuss. The dissertation analyzed the notion of ‘unavoidability’ in Habermas’ theory of communicative action, in a critical attempt to clarify its sources of normativity. From the late 1980s, he regularly visited Frankfurt, later Gießen Universities, first as a DAAD scholar. He soon established himself as a highly regarded figure among colleagues and students, whom he treated with unflagging curiosity and egalitarian respect.
Felmon Davis’s research centered on moral theory and the philosophy of religion. He tried to convince his Frankfurt friends of a meta-ethically realist interpretation of discourse ethics, which he defended in a 1994 article entitled “Discourse Ethics and Ethical Realism. A Realist Re-Alignment of Discourse Ethics” in the European Journal of Philosophy. His style in philosophical debate was not adversarial, but invitational: He thought it his duty to present his position as attractive as possible in order to invite colleagues to join him. In the late 1990s, he pre-empted much of the current philosophical discussion on the notion of race, and about its origins in the history of philosophy, in a review of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s path-breaking reader Race and the Enlightenment (Constellations, 1998) and in ‘Rassendiskurs, Gerechtigkeit und Demokratie in den USA. Eine Fallstudie‘ in Hauke Brunkhorst’s collection Demokratischer Experimentalismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1998).
In later years, he focussed on the epistemic credentials of religion. As a non-believer, having been brought up in a Catholic family, he vehemently opposed the liberal exclusion of religious discourse from the political public sphere, without thereby awarding it claims to rationality. The upshot of his decade-long reflection can be found in his chapter on Habermas on monotheism in the Habermas Handbook (C. Lafont, R. Kreide, H. Brunkhorst (eds.), NY: Columbia UP, 207-218), and especially in his article ‘Habermas's Expressivist Theology: Chalice Half-Full?’ (Las Torres de Lucca. International Journal of Political Philosophy 2012), probably the only paper to elucidate Habermas’ view of religion with Simon Blackburn’s theory of morality. His dialectical skills are shown to great effect in a recorded debate on the rationality of Christianity with William Lane Craig. He was an early adapter to all things digital and to computer ethics and metaphysics in particular.
After their retirement, Felmon Davis and his spouse Elisabeth Egetemeyr relocated to Mannheim, Germany. Davis was a regularly visitor and guest at Regina Kreide’s doctoral colloquium in Political Theory at Gießen University. His reputation was legendary among the students he met and taught at Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Gießen and Hamburg. He increasingly despaired of the political development of the U.S., but always aimed at some reconciliation, at least on an epistemological level, as in his unpublished paper on ‘Democracy and the Religious Right’ (2019, on ResearchGate). He taught his final course on “Fear, Truth, and Democracy” in the Winter of 2021/22 at Hamburg University.
We’re privileged to have known him.
Peter Niesen, Hamburg, 9.5.2025
See also: "The Union community mourns philosopher Felmon Davis"
