Richard Popkin
Encyclopedia
Richard H. Popkin was an academic philosopher who specialized in the history of enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 philosophy and early modern anti-dogmatism. His 1960 work The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes introduced previously unrecognised influence on Western thought in the seventeenth century, the Pyrrhonian Scepticism of Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus , was a physician and philosopher, and has been variously reported to have lived in Alexandria, Rome, or Athens. His philosophical work is the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman skepticism....

. Popkin also was an internationally acclaimed scholar on Jewish and Christian millenarianism
Millenarianism
Millenarianism is the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed, based on a one-thousand-year cycle. The term is more generically used to refer to any belief centered around 1000 year intervals...

 and messianism
Messianism
Messianism is the belief in a messiah, a savior or redeemer. Many religions have a messiah concept, including the Jewish Messiah, the Christian Christ, the Muslim Mahdi and Isa , the Buddhist Maitreya, the Hindu Kalki and the Zoroastrian Saoshyant...

.

Life

Richard Popkin was born in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

 to Louis and author Zelda Popkin
Zelda Popkin
Zelda Popkin was an American author of novels and mystery stories. She created Mary Carner, one of the first professional female private detectives in fiction. Carner was a store detective who appeared in five novels...

, who jointly ran a small public relations firm. He earned his Bachelor's degree and, in 1950, his Ph.D. from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. He taught at American universities, including the University of Connecticut
University of Connecticut
The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...

, The University of Iowa, the University of California San Diego, Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...

, and the University of California Los Angeles. He was visiting professor at University of California Berkeley, Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, Emory University
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...

, Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University is a public university located in Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel. With nearly 30,000 students, TAU is Israel's largest university.-History:...

, and was Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

. Popkin was the founding director of the International Archives of the History of Ideas and the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Among his honors, Popkin was awarded the Nicholas Murray Butler Medal by Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

. He was president emeritus and founding editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Richard Popkin spent his later years living in Pacific Palisades, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. He died of emphysema
Emphysema
Emphysema is a long-term, progressive disease of the lungs that primarily causes shortness of breath. In people with emphysema, the tissues necessary to support the physical shape and function of the lungs are destroyed. It is included in a group of diseases called chronic obstructive pulmonary...

 in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

 in April 2005. His papers have been archived at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library , one of twelve official libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, is one of the most comprehensive rare books and manuscripts libraries in the United States, with particular strengths in English literature and history , Oscar Wilde, and fine...

 at UCLA.

Family

Professor Popkin is survived by Juliet (née Greenstone), whom he married in 1944, and two of their three children, Jeremy Popkin (b. 1948) and his younger daughter, Susan Popkin (b. 1961). Margaret Popkin (1950–2005) was a prominent civil rights lawyer and activist, known particularly for her work in El Salvador during the civil war of the 1980s.

Works

Richard H. Popkin published many textbooks on philosophy, some with Avrum Stroll
Avrum Stroll
Avrum Stroll is a research professor at the University of California, San Diego. He is a distinguished philosopher and a noted scholar in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of language, and twentieth-century analytic philosophy.-Books:...

. He was editor and translator of selections from Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1965). His last book, Disputing Christianity (2007) was completed posthumously by his son.

A Festschrift volume of essays in his honor, The Legacies of Richard H. Popkin, also edited by his son Jeremy Popkin, was published in 2009 (Springer, New York).

Beyond his philosophical works, he is noted for writing The Second Oswald (1966), questioning the Warren Report lone gunman explanation of the John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

 assassination.

Selected bibliography

  • The History of Scepticism from Savanarola to Bayle. Third, enlarged, edition, 2003. ISBN 0-19-510768-3.
  • The High Road to Pyrrhonism, 1980.
  • The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Brill, 1992. Essays.
    • Incl.: Hume's
      David Hume
      David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...

       Racism Reconsidered
      , pp. 64 –75.
  • with David S. Katz
    David S. Katz
    David S. Katz FRHistS is professor of early modern European history at Tel Aviv University in Israel, where he has taught since 1978. He holds the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books and is director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization. Katz received his...

    : Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, Hill & Wang, 2000.
  • with Avrum Stroll: Philosophy Made Simple, Doubleday (Made Simple Books), New York, 1956. ISBN 0-385-42533-3
  • as editor: The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-231-10128-7
  • The Second Oswald Avon Books, 1966. Commercial ebook has ISBN 1-886420-27-0.
  • Spinoza (Oneworld Philosophers), 2004. ISBN 1851683399

External links

, with an introduction by Richard H. Popkin
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