Lecturers & Authors

John Caird

Principal, University of Glasgow
1820 to 1898

John Caird, preacher and Principal of Glasgow University, was born to marine engineer John Caird and his wife, Janet Young, in Greenock, Scotland, on 15 December 1820. The eldest of seven sons, Caird was educated in the Greenock schools and then, at the age of fifteen, went to work for his father’s engineering firm, where he became skilled in the trade. In 1837 he convinced his father to allow him a year of study at Glasgow University, where he excelled in mathematics and logic. After the appointed year, he returned to his father’s firm and resumed his work as an engineer.

Edward Caird

Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Glasgow
1835 to 1908

Edward Caird, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University and later Master of Balliol College, Oxford, was born on 22 March 1835, in Greenock, Scotland, fifth of John and Janet Caird’s seven sons. His father, partner and manager of Caird and Co., an engineering firm in Greenock, died in 1838.

After attending Greenock Academy, Caird matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1850 to study for a degree in arts and divinity. His intimate circle of classmates during this time of studies included John Nichol and George Rankine Luke.

Lewis Campbell

Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of St Andrews
1830 to 1908

Lewis Campbell was born in 1830 in Edinburgh to Captain Robert Campbell, who was related to the Campbells of Kirnan, Argyll. His father died when he was only two years old. Campbell received a first class education, first at Edinburgh Academy, at Glasgow University (1846-9) and at Oxford.

Charles Arthur Campbell

Professor of Logic and Rhetoric, University of Glasgow
1897 to 1974

Charles Arthur Campbell was born in 1897. He held the post of professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow from 1938 to 1961, and delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews from 1953 to 1955. His publications include Scepticism and Construction: Bradley’s Sceptical Principle as the Basis of Constructive Philosophy (1931),Moral Intuition and the Principle of Self-Realization (1952), and Is ‘Free-Will' a Pseudo-Problem? (1967).

 

Geoffrey Cantor

Professor of History of Science, University of Leeds
1943

Geoffrey Cantor is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Leeds. He is also a member of the general committee of the International Society for Science and Religion and part of the editorial board of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. His research interests include history of physics (especially optics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) science and religion (especially Quaker and Jewish engagements with science) and science in the nineteenth century.

Sean Carroll

Research Professor of Physics, Caltech
1966

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity.

Henry Chadwick

Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford
1920 to 2008

Churchman historian patristics scholar and ecumenist par excellence Sir Henry Chadwick epitomizes the careful graceful and eminently concerned English scholar-theologian. Born 23 June 1920 into an accomplished family (his brother Owen being as accomplished in modern Church history as Henry is in that of the early Church though it is one of his sisters he calls ‘the brightest of us all’) Chadwick was educated at Eton and Magdalene College Cambridge where he received a degree in music. He took his D.D. at Christ Church Oxford.

William Owen Chadwick

Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge
1916

The Reverend Professor William Owen Chadwick (b. 20 May 1916) is distinguished not only as a historian but distinctive in being a Christian scholar. He is a clergyman-professor of a kind once common in Cambridge but now very rare. His historical writings convey a sense of vocation in the noblest sense of the word. By allowing his religious convictions to be merged with his scholarly commitment, Chadwick is fully aware of the inherent difficulty of the historian’s task.

Donald Geoffrey Charlton

Professor of French, University of Warwick
1925 to 1995

Donald Geoffrey Charlton was born in 1925. Prior to wartime service with the Royal Navy during which he worked as an interpreter of French and German he read philosophy at St Edmund Hall. Following the war he enrolled at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he took a first-class degree in modern languages in 1948. He was very shortly thereafter appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University College of Hull which he held while working towards his PhD under Professor H. J. Hunt which he completed in 1955. He married and had three children.

Noam Chomsky

Institute Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1928

Noam Chomsky was born to William and Elsie (Simonfsky) Chomsky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 7 December 1928. William, a Hebrew scholar of some reputation, had emigrated from Russia to the United States. In 1945, Noam Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received a B.A. degree in 1949 an M.A. degree in 1951 and a Ph.D. in 1955. In 1949 Chomsky married the linguist Carol Schatz. They have three children.

Patricia Churchland

Professor of Philosophy, University of California-San Diego
1943

Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian philosopher who has been a leading advocate of the neurobiological approach to understanding human consciousness, ethics, and free will. Teaching at the University of California, San Diego, since 1984, she has been a leader in the interdisciplinary project of combining psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience in research on the mind.

Stephen R. L. Clark

Lecturer of Philosophy, University of Liverpool
1945

Philosopher Stephen Richard Lyster Clark was born in Luton Bedfordshire England on 30 October 1945 but his family background is actually Shropshire/Staffordshire on the Welsh borders. His father D. A. R. Clark began his professional life as an apprentice railway engineer and went on to teach technology at the college level and his mother M. K. Clark daughter of Member of Parliament Samuel Finney was a teacher by training but later left her career to fully devote herself to her home and her children.

Sarah Coakley

Deputy chair of the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Cambridge
1951

Sarah Coakley is an Anglican theologian who holds one of the top chairs in Divinity at Cambridge University. She has also led major research projects on theology and the biological concept of evolutionary cooperation, and has written extensively on Christian theology and feminism.

Gerald Allan Cohen

Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London
1941 to 2009

Gerald Allan Cohen was born in 1941 to proletarian Marxist and antireligious parents in Montreal Canada. He described himself as ‘very Jewish’ despite a lack of belief in the God of the Old Testament. Cohen attended the Morris Winchevsky School where he was taught to believe in both democracy and communism. His education there ended in 1952 when the school was shut down following raids by the Anti-Subversive Squad of the Province of Quebec on both the school and its parent sponsor the United Jewish People’s Order.

Frederick Charles Copleston

Professor Emeritus of the History of Philosophy, University of London
1907 to 1994

Frederick (Freddie) Charles Copleston was born on 10 April 1907 near Taunton Somerset England. He was raised an Anglican and educated at Marlborough College from 1920 to 1925. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday he converted to Catholicism and his father subsequently almost disowned him. After the initial shock, however, his father saw fit to help Copleston through his education and he attended St. John’s in Oxford in 1925 only managing a disappointing third in classical moderations. He redeemed himself somewhat with a good second at Greats in 1929.

Don Cupitt

Dean Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
1934

Don Cupitt former Dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge was born in 1934 at Oldham England. He was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity Hall Cambridge where he studied the natural sciences theology and the philosophy of religion. In 1959 Cupitt was ordained to the Diocese of Manchester (Church of England); from 1962 to 1965 he was Vice-Principal of Westcott House an Anglican theological college in Cambridge and became Dean of Emmanuel College in 1966. From 1968 to 1996 he lectured in the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity.

David Daiches

Director, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University
1912 to 2005

David Daiches was born in Sunderland on 2 September 1912 to a Jewish family of Lithuanian background. At the end of World War I he moved to Edinburgh where his father served as a rabbi. At age eleven Daiches’s father submitted several of the young David’s poems to literary magazines and the publication of one of them attracted much attention. He attended the University of Edinburgh where he won the Elliot prize before he went on to study at Balliol College in Oxford. There he became the Elton exhibitioner.

David Daube

Regius Professor of Civil Law, Oxford
1909 to 1999

David Daube was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany on 8 February 1909, the second son in a strict Orthodox Jewish family. After an initial degree at the University of Freiburg he completed his doctorate in law at Göttingen University in 1932, by which time he was fluent in German, French, Latin, ancient Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. The following year he left Germany in the face of Hitler’s Nazi regime and began studying Roman law at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge from whence he received a second doctorate in 1936.

Richard Dawkins

Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford
1941

Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941 and educated at Oxford University completing his undergraduate studies in 1962 but remaining for his doctorate under the supervision of ethnologist Niko Tinbergen. Between 1967 and 1969 Dawkins was Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1970 he became Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford where he has remained since. In 1995 Dawkins became the first person to hold the newly endowed Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Christopher (Henry) Dawson

Chair, Roman Catholic Studies, Harvard Divinity School
1889 to 1970

Born in Hay Castle, England, in 1889 and educated at Winchester College and at Trinity College, Oxford, Christopher Dawson began his academic career studying modern history. Becoming a Roman Catholic shortly after his time at Oxford, Dawson consistently focused his research and writing on issues of European culture and religion. Lecturer in the History of Culture, University College, Exeter, Gifford Lecturer and first recipient of the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University (1958–1962), Dawson was also editor of the Dublin Review.

Pages