Doctor Paul Kurtz was the founder of my parent company,
Prometheus Books, and the man who hired me in March of 2004 to give him the SF imprint that became Pyr. I'll always be grateful to him for that opportunity, one which changed my life in so many ways. I'm very sad to say that he passed away this Saturday at the age of 86.
Right now my favorite memory of Doctor Kurtz is from about thirty minutes after we shook on my employment agreement. Having a coffee in the Buffalo airport, I asked, "If I work here, can I still believe in the Loch Ness Monster?" I got a good five minutes on how all the classic footage was faked. Short answer: No. Lake monsters aside, humanism has lost a great champion this week.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 22, 2012
CONTACT:
Jill Maxick, Vice President of Marketing; Director of Publicity
PAUL KURTZ, PUBLISHER, PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, AND “FATHER OF SECULAR HUMANISM,” DIES AT 86
Amherst,
New York — Paul Kurtz, philosopher, prolific author, publisher, and
founder of several secular humanist institutions as well as the
for-profit independent press Prometheus Books,
died on Saturday, October 20, 2012 at his home in Amherst, New York. He
was 86.
Professor
Kurtz was widely heralded as the “father of secular humanism.” With his
fifty plus books (many translated into foreign languages around the
world), multitudinous media appearances
and public lectures, and other vast and seminal accomplishments in the
organized skeptic and humanist movements, he was certainly the most
important secular voice of the second part of the 20th century. He was an ardent advocate for the secular
and scientific worldview and a caring, ethical humanism as a key to the good life.
Kurtz
was a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at
Buffalo from 1965 to his retirement in 1991 as professor emeritus. He
founded the publishing company Prometheus
Books in 1969, Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) in 1976,
Free Inquiry magazine and the Council for Secular Humanism in
1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991. Later projects included the
launching of a scholarly journal,
The Human Prospect, and a new nonprofit think tank, the Institute
for Science and Human Values (both in 2010) where he served as chairman
up until his death.
Paul
Kurtz was born on December 21, 1925 in Newark, New Jersey. After
graduating from high school he enrolled into Washington Square College
at New York University, where he was elected freshman
class president and became head of a student group called American
Youth for Democracy. This was the beginning of his long romance with the
power of ideas, but soon he would feel the call to serve his country.
Six
months before his eighteenth birthday he enlisted in the army. 1n 1944
he and his unit found themselves smack in the middle of the Battle of
the Bulge. Kurtz would later recall, “I was
on the front lines for the rest of the war, in units liberating France,
Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia.” He entered both the Buchenwald
and Dachau concentration camps shortly after they were liberated and met
the survivors of Nazi brutality and their
SS captors. It was an experience that would be seared in his memory for
the rest of his life. Kurtz traveled with a copy of Plato’s
Republic throughout the war, referring to it frequently during
down times. His love of philosophy was becoming solidified during the
most trying of times.
Upon
the end of the war, Kurtz returned to the United States where he
resumed his studies at New York University. It was there that he came
face-to-face with the pragmatic naturalist Sidney
Hook, the staunch anticommunist, humanist, and public philosopher who
had studied himself under the leading American philosopher of the first
part of the 20th century, John Dewey. Kurtz would later call this encounter “his most important intellectual
experience.”
As
“Dewey’s Bulldog,” Hook’s fierce commitment to democracy, humanism,
secularism, and human rights exerted a powerful influence on the young
student. Kurtz completed his undergraduate studies
at NYU in 1948 and decided to continue his studies at Columbia
University—where Dewey’s influence was even more
palpable—but Hook and Kurtz would remain lifelong colleagues and friends. When Hook’s famous autobiography,
Out of Step, was published in 1987, Hook sent a personal copy of
the book to his former student with an inscription inside that read
“Student, colleague, friend and co-worker in the vineyards in the
struggle for a free society, who will carry the torch
for the next generation.”
Kurtz
went on to earn his MA and, in 1952, his PhD in philosophy at Columbia,
where he studied under a group of distinguished professors—many of them
former students of Dewey—and all scholars
with sterling reputations of their own. The title of his dissertation
was “The Problems of Value Theory.” His years at Columbia gave shape and
definition to his life; he emerged from his rich educational experience
as a philosopher firmly under the sway of
pragmatic, naturalistic humanism. The upshot of this orientation was
the abiding conviction that it was incumbent upon philosophers to
descend from the isolation of the ivory tower and enter into the public
arena where scientific and philosophical wisdom can
be applied to the concrete moral and political problems of society at
large and individual men and women engaged in the heat of life. This is
the philosophical perspective that he would carry with him for the rest
of his professional life.
Before
settling at SUNY-Buffalo, Kurtz held academic positions at Trinity
College in Connecticut (1952-59), Vassar College (1959-60), and Union
College in Schenectady, New York 1960-65) during
which time he also was a visiting lecturer at the New School for Social
Research.
Kurtz was the editor of
The Humanist magazine from 1967 to 1978 and was responsible for drafting
Humanist Manifesto II, which was greeted with immediate enthusiasm
upon its release in 1973. Endorsements rolled in from Sidney Hook, Isaac
Asimov, Betty Friedan, Albert Ellis, B.F. Skinner, Maxine Greene, and
James Farmer from the United States, and Nobel
Prize–winner Francis Crick, Sir Julian Huxley, and A.J. Ayer from Great
Britain. Altogether there were 275 signers.
Humanist Manifesto II also became instant news, with a front-page story appearing in the
New York Times, and articles in Le Monde in France and the London Times
in Britain. An enduring phrase from that document stood as a clarion
call to all clear thinking people that democratic, engaged, and
responsible citizenship was needed
like never before: “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.”
The international skeptics movement got a lift in 1976 when Kurtz founded
Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Concerned during the mid-1970s with
the rampant growth of antiscience and pseudoscientific attitudes among
the public at large, along with popular beliefs in astrology, faith
healing, and claims of UFO and bigfoot sightings,
Kurtz, along with fellow colleagues Martin Gardner and Joe Nickell,
became a persistent foe of claptrap everywhere. As a critic of
supernaturalism and the paranormal, he was consistently on the side of
reason, always demanding evidence for extraordinary claims.
It was during this period that Kurtz emerged in the public square as a
stalwart proponent of the need for critical thinking in all areas of
human life.
As
a champion of many liberal causes during his lifetime, Kurtz became,
during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, an ardent supporter of
women’s reproductive rights, voluntary euthanasia,
the right to privacy, and the teaching of evolution in the public
schools. And he was adamantly opposed to discrimination on the basis of
secular orientation or skin color. Yet Kurtz often found himself the
target of both the extreme left and the extreme right,
as his own critical and moderating intelligence often led him to
embrace centrist positions on a variety of issues. He was a strong
critic of supernaturalism and religious fundamentalism, but decidedly
against the tone of the militant atheists.
During
the student riots of the Vietnam era, Kurtz and his colleague Hook
organized a moderate liberal-conservative coalition of faculty from
across the New York state university system to
oppose the often violent disruptions occurring on campus, as rebellious
students set fires, blocked entrances to classrooms, and staged
sit-ins. Kurtz found himself thrust into the middle of the drama and the
spotlight, as SUNY-Buffalo became known as the
“Berkeley of the East.” Kurtz’s battle against the mayhem made him a
target of the student and faculty radicals. Soon he was being bitterly
castigated as a “right-wing fascist” and “lackey of Kissinger, Nixon,
and Rockefeller.”
But
it was Kurtz’s deep involvement with the international humanist
movement where his indelible mark will be felt for many years to come.
Of all his contributions, it was his role as the
leading intellectual and organizational figure in humanist and
free-thought circles that he relished the most. It was the animating
force of his prolific career. Bill Cooke, an intellectual historian,
wrote in 2011: “Like Hook, Paul Kurtz has always been keen
to distance humanism from dogmatic allies of whatever stripe. And like
Dewey, Kurtz has wanted to emphasize the positive elements of humanism;
its program for living rather than its record of accusations against
religion. But it was Kurtz’s fate to be prominent
at a time of resurgent fundamentalism.”
“Free Inquiry
(magazine) was founded in 1980 at a time when secular humanism was
under heavy attack in the United States from the so-called Moral
Majority,” wrote Kurtz in 2000. His
aims were twofold: by reaching out to the leaders of thought and
opinion and the educated layperson, he sought to bring intellectual
cachet and respectability to the philosophy of secular humanism while
also forthrightly defending the scientific and secular
viewpoint at a time when it was being demonized. The magazine grew to
become a highly respected journal of secular humanist thought and
opinion.
Kurtz
was responsible for drafting four highly influential documents
(“manifestos”) that served as guideposts for the secular movement from
1973 to 2010. These statements attracted the endorsement
and support of many of the world’s most esteemed scientists and
authors, including E.O. Wilson, Steve Allen, Rebecca Goldstein, Steven
Pinker, Arthur Caplan, Richard Dawkins, Brand Blanshard, Ann Druyan,
Walter Kaufmann, Daniel Dennett, Terry O’ Neill, Paul
Boyer, Lawrence Krauss, James Randi, Patricia Schroeder, Carol Tavris,
Jean-Claude Pecker, and many more. His last and most recent excursus was
the
Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular of Principles and Values (2010) a forward-thinking blueprint for bringing humanism far into the 21st century and beyond, emphasizing the need for a planetary consciousness and a shared, secular ethic that
can cut across ideological and cultural divisions.
A
genuine pioneer, Kurtz was always blazing new trails. He was the first
humanist leader to call for and help implement a concerted worldwide
effort to attract people of African descent to
organized humanism. He helped establish African Americans for Humanism
(AAH) in 1989. He was instrumental in helping to create and support,
with Jim Christopher, Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), a
nonreligious support group for those struggling with
alcohol and drug addiction.
Especially
proud of his cosmopolitanism, Kurtz’s impact was truly global in scope.
In 2001, he helped finance the first major humanist conference in
sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria). He helped
establish humanist groups in thirty African nations, Egypt, Romania,
and the Netherlands. He was so highly admired in India that he became
virtually a household name.
Settling
into his role as the elder statesman of a movement he saw take on wings
around the world, he wrote, “Embracing humanism intellectually and
emotionally can liberate you from the regnant
spiritual theologies, mythologies that bind you and put you out of
cognitive touch with the real world. By embracing the power of humanism,
I submit, you can lead an enriched life that is filled with joyful
exuberance, intrinsically meaningful and developed
within shared moral communities.”
Kurtz’s joyful philosophy of life is presented in
The Fullness of Life (1974) and Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness (1977). Of his many published works, the two he was perhaps most proud of are
The Transcendental Temptation (1986) and The Courage to Become (1997). His core books on the importance of critical intelligence and the ethics of humanism include
The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge” (1992); Living without Religion: Eupraxsophy
(1994); and Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Secularism (2008). His primer
What Is Secular Humanism? (2006) is about as cogent and clear an introduction to the topic as one can find.
Meaning and Value in a Secular Age—a collection of his seminal writings about eupraxsophy—was published this year.
Kurtz
is survived by his wife, Claudine Kurtz; son, Jonathan Kurtz, and
daughter-in-law Gretchen Kurtz; daughters Valerie Fehrenback and
Patricia
Kurtz; daughter Anne Kurtz and son-in-law Jesse Showers; and five
grandchildren, Jonathan, Taylor, and Cameron Kurtz, and Jonathan and
Jacqueline Fehrenback.
The
family has requested that gifts or donations in honor of Dr. Kurtz be
given to the Institute for Science and Human Values. A public
celebration of his life will be held at a future date.
# # #
The Pathfinder Tales novels are set in the world of Paizo Publishing's
Pathfinder Role Playing Game, though knowledge of the game isn't
necessary to appreciate either work. In fact, Death's Heretic
was chosen as the number three fantasy novel of the year in the Barnes
& Noble Book Club's 2011 Best Fantasy Releases (a fact which more
than legitimizes the Pathfinder Tales fiction editor, James L. Sutter,
in publishing himself in his own line).
He shows some classic paintings that inspired his piece, as well as rare glimpses into his pencils and early process pieces.
and 
), and freelance copyeditor Gabrielle Harbowy. They say:
, will be out this coming January. Meanwhile, today Bowing to the Future is hosting a post on World Building by Gail as part of her annual 
And this scene from “
The second show was an all request show. He played for an hour and fifteen minutes, took an hour and a half between shows, then came back and played for two hours and fifteen minutes. Acoustics were wonderful and there were no bad
seats, but we were at a table in the very front with an unobstructed
view right to him. He talked about how things had changed since he played the Vic in Chicago in
1992 (I was at that show!). His voice was incredible and his guitar work is
really amazing. There's a song called Sweet Ghost of Light which I've
always known was probably the most intimate depiction of an artist's
relationship with their muse ever penned. Except muse is the wrong word
because it's not so external. I had a particularly emotional response to the song, so, for that reason, here are the lyrics:
and
has his own screenplay-derived system called "Seven-Point Story Structure." 
He recommends it as a good starting point for an introduction to S&S (which it is). However, he does add that the older material is stronger than the newer, which he feels strays into slipstream. He says, "I would have liked to see more stories here from Joe Abercrombie, KJ Parker, Scott Lynch, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix or James Enge, the heirs of the form." Interestingly, all six of these authors are in 
which I co-edited with Jonathan Strahan.