Concept

Frederick Copleston

Summary
Frederick Charles Copleston (10 April 1907 – 3 February 1994) was an English Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy (1946–75). Copleston achieved a degree of popularity in the media for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer. Frederick Charles Copleston was born on 10 April 1907 at Claremont in the parish of Trull, near Taunton in Somerset, England, the eldest son of Frederick Selwyn Copleston (1850–1935), a judge of the High Court in Rangoon, Burma, by his second wife, Norah Margaret Little. He was a member of the family of Copleston, lords of the manor of Copleston in Devon until 1659, one of the most ancient in that county according to a traditional rhyme related by John Prince (d.1723): "Crocker, Cruwys, and Coplestone, When the Conqueror came were at home" He was raised an Anglican—his uncle, Reginald Stephen Copleston, was an Anglican bishop of Calcutta; another uncle, Ernest Copleston, was the Anglican Bishop of Colombo. Copleston was educated at Marlborough College from 1920 to 1925. At the age of eighteen, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith, which caused a great deal of stress in his family. Copleston explained his recognition of the objective authority in the Catholic Church:"It seemed to me that if Christ was truly the Son of God and if he founded a Church to teach all nations in His name, it must be a Church teaching with authority, as her Master did. Obviously one might deny that Christ was the Son of God, and one might reject the claim that he founded a Church. But if these two claims were accepted, it seemed to me that in spite of all its faults the Roman Catholic Church was the only one which could reasonably be thought to have developed out of what Christ established.
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