Richard H. Popkin
b. 1923

(Photo from http://www.cmonline.com/boson/nonfiction/oswald/oswald.html)

      Richard H. Popkin is a philosopher who specializes in the history of ideas and in Jewish intellectual history. He has been chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and currently is professor emeritus of philosophy at Washington University (St. Louis) and adjunct professor of philosophy and history at UCLA. He has held two Fulbright Research Fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, and has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, Brandeis, Duke, Emory, Tel Aviv, UCLA, and was Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. He has held teaching posts at the University of California San Diego, the Claremont Colleges, and the University of Iowa. He recently completed a visit as the Woodruff Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He currently lives in Pacific Palisades, California.
      Professor Poplin is founding director of the International Archives of the History of Ideas, and president emeritus and founding editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. He has written many books in philosophy, including The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought; Introduction to Philosophy (with Avrum Stroll); and The High Road to Pyrrhonism. He is the editor and translator of selections from Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Cultural Dictionary. More recently, he has cowritten the 1999 book Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium with David S. Katz and edited the 1999 Columbia History of Western Philosophy. He has also written, in both French and English, a long series of journal articles on Spinoza.
      To JFK folk, Popkin is best known as the author of The Second Oswald, published in 1967. For an extended summary of that book, see his article “The Second Oswald: The Case for a Conspiracy Theory,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books of 28 July 1966. See also the replies by Josiah Thompson and Curtis Crawford, and Popkin's reply to Crawford.