Richard Popkin

Richard Henry Popkin (December 27, 1923 - April 14, 2005) was an American philosopher with an academic focus on skepticism and the history of philosophy.

In the area of conspiratology, Popkin was skeptical of the Warren Commission's findings, and wrote a book called The Second Oswald (1966), in which he argued that Lee Harvey Oswald was impersonated by some unknown actor in the weeks and months prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some nine years later, in 1975, Popkin wrote a memo to President Gerald Ford stating that he had documents "indicating that U.S. intelligence agencies had a laboratory producing robot murderers (Manchurian Candidates) and that at least one of them took part in the assassination of John F. Kennedy," and further that the "programmer of this robot murderer" was then at large.^[R]

Selected Bibliography

• Popkin, Richard; Stroll, Avrum (1956), Philosophy Made Simple, New York: Doubleday 
• Popkin, Richard (1960), The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Assen: Van Gorcum 
• Popkin, Richard; Stroll, Avrum (1961), Introduction to Philosophy, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 
• Popkin, Richard (1966), The Second Oswald, New York: Avon Books 
• Popkin, Richard; Stroll, Avrum (1973), Philosophy and the Human Spirit: A Brief Introduction, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 
• Popkin, Richard (1980), Watson, Richard A.; Force, James E., eds., The High Road to Pyrrhonism, Austin Hill Press 
• Popkin, Richard (1987), Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence, Leiden: Brill 
• Popkin, Richard (1992), The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Leiden: Brill 
• Popkin, Richard; Katz, David S. (2000), Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, Hill & Wang 
• Popkin, Richard; Stroll, Avrum (2002), Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books 
• Popkin, Richard (2007), Disputing Christianity. The 400-Year-Old Debate over Rabbi Isaac ben Abraham of Troki's Classic Arguments, Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books 

Reading

• Richard Popkin, spartacus-educational.com, https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKpopkin.htm 

Press Coverage

• Russell, Dick (1 Sep. 1975), "Professor Popkin & the Robot Assassin: 'Dear President Ford: I Know Who Killed JFK...'", Village Voice: 12-14  — included in Russell's On the Trail of the JFK Assassins: A Groundbreaking Look at America's Most Infamous Conspiracy (2008)