Two Pillars of Skepticism — Leon Jaroff and Paul Kurtz — Died This Weekend

[struggle4progress]

October 22, 2012 11:26 am

Leon Jaroff, the man who founded Discover Magazine in 1980, has died at the age of 85. Paul Kurtz, a philosopher, was only a year older than Jaroff and also passed away this weekend. Together, the two men represent some of the founding ideas of the modern skeptic community ...

... The New York Times writes:

As early as 1971, Mr. Jaroff noticed that newsstand sales of Time magazine jumped almost every time a science article was on the cover, and he began presenting the numbers to corporate executives. “He managed to persuade the heavyweights,” Frederic Golden, a former science writer and editor at Time and Discover, said. “Selling science to people who graduated to be managers was very difficult.”

... The American Humanist Association writes:

“Paul Kurtz worked tirelessly for decades to see secular humanism become accepted as an alternative philosophy to traditional religion,” said Roy Speckhardt, the executive director of the American Humanist Association. “The attention and guidance he gave to the humanist movement had an unmistakable global impact.”

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/10/two-pillars-of-skepticism-leon-jaroff-and-paul-jurtz-died-this-weekend/