Frederick Copleston

Frederick Copleston
Frederick Copleston, 1987
Born	Frederick Charles Copleston (1907-04-10)10 April 1907 Taunton, England
Died	3 February 1994(1994-02-03) (aged 86) London, England
Alma mater	Heythrop College, University of London
Occupation	Historian, author, philosopher, priest, apologist

Frederick Charles Copleston, SJ, CBE (10 April 1907 – 3 February 1994) was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy (1946–75).

Copleston achieved a degree of popularity in the media for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer.

Frederick Charles Copleston was born 10 April 1907 near Taunton, Somerset, England. He was raised in the Anglican faith—his uncle, Reginald Stephen Copleston, was an Anglican bishop of Calcutta—and was educated at Marlborough College from 1920 to 1925. At the age of eighteen, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith, which caused great stress in his family. Despite his initial objections, his father helped him complete his education at St John's College, Oxford, where he studied from 1925 to 1929. He graduated from Oxford University in 1929 having managed a third in classical moderations and a good second at Greats.

In 1930, Copleston became a Jesuit. After studying at the Jesuit novitiate in Roehampton for two years, he resettled at Heythrop, where in 1937 he was ordained a Jesuit priest at Heythrop College. In 1938 he traveled to Germany to complete his training, returning to Britain just before the outbreak of war in 1939. Copleston originally intended to study for his doctorate at the Gregorian University in Rome, but the war now made that impossible. Instead, he accepted an offer to return to Heythrop College to teach the history of philosophy to the few remaining Jesuits there.