Exuberant Skepticism
Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was the author or editor of more than fifty books, including The Transcendental Temptation, The Courage to Become, and Embracing the Power of Humanism, plus nine hundred articles and reviews. He was the founder and chairman of the Center for Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He appeared on many major television and radio talk shows and has lectured at universities worldwide.John R. Shook (Amherst, NY) is vice president for education and research and a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York. He is the author of Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. He is the editor of Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism and, with Hugh McDonald, of F. C. S. Schiller on Pragmatism and Humanism: Selected Writings, 1891–1939, among other works.