Kai Nielsen
From Philosopedia
Nielsen, Kai (1926– )
Nielsen received his B.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph. D. at Duke University. The author of numerous books and articles, he is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association. Also, he is one of the founding members of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
For many years he taught at New YOrk University (NYU). He currently is adjunct professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Calgary.
Nielsen's specialties include metaphilosophy, ethics, and social and political philosophy.
He has been called one of the century’s leading atheists, having written Philosophy and Atheism: In Defense of Atheism (1985) and Ethics Without God (1990). In 1989, he wrote God, Skepticism, and Modernity, followed in 1990 by Does God Exist?: The Great Debate, in which he debates J. P. Moreland, a Christian and professor of philosophy at Biola University.
Nielsen calls God a figment of human inspiration and states that disbelief in a god does not mean that an individual is immoral or will be unethical. In 1996 he published Naturalism Without Foundations, expressing the view that naturalism can avoid the pitfalls of both absolutism and relativism and showing what he terms the playful but still corrosive skepticism of post-modernism.
Nielsen is a contributing editor of Philo, for which he wrote “Naturalism and Religion: Must Naturalistic Explanations Explain Religion Away?” (Spring-Summer 1998) and “On Being a Secularist All the Way Down” (Fall-Winter 1998).
“The atheism I articulate and defend is a naturalism in that it rejects all forms of supernaturalism,” he states. It is a social naturalism that can also be termed a nonscientistic naturalism and a form of historicism.
When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Nielsen was a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary in Canada.
(See Nielsen’s entry for “Agnosticism” in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas and for “Atheism” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1983.)
