Frederick Copleston

Frederick Copleston was an English Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy. His A History of Philosophy, published in nine volumes from 1946 to 1975 and beginning with Greece and Rome, became one of the most widely used surveys of Western philosophy in English, valued for presenting each thinker fairly and clearly. He taught at Heythrop College and at the Gregorian University in Rome. He is also remembered for his 1948 BBC radio debate with Bertrand Russell on the existence of God, in which he defended the argument from contingency.

Key ideas

• A history of philosophy should present each thinker sympathetically and accurately before judging them.
• Contingent beings need a necessary being as their sufficient reason: the argument he defended against Russell.
• Aquinas's Five Ways concern God as the present ground of existence, not a first event in a chain stretching back in time.
• In Religion and the One he compared Western and Asian ideas of an ultimate reality.

Major works

• A History of Philosophy, Volume I: Greece and Rome (1946)
• A History of Philosophy (9 vols, 1946–1975)
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture (1942)
• Aquinas (1955)
• Religion and the One (1982)

In the Book corner

• A History of Philosophy, Volume I: Greece and Rome 1946; revised 1947 · Intermediate
  The first volume of the multi-volume history of Western philosophy by Frederick Copleston, an English Jesuit who taught at Heythrop College, originally…

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