Ingemar Hedenius

Per Arvid Ingemar Hedenius lived from April 5, 1908 to April 30, 1982 and was a Swedish philosopher who served as Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University from 1947 to 1973. He became known chiefly for his opposition to organized Christianity, expressed most influentially in his 1949 book Tro och vetande, Belief and Knowledge, which set off one of the widest cultural debates in Swedish history over the truth of Christian doctrine and the place of the church in society. He argued against theology's claim to rational knowledge through three postulates, concerning the psychology of religion, the theory of language and logic, and called for religious studies to be separated from theology as an academic discipline. He also published the magazine Kulturkontakt from 1957 to 1960, and the Swedish Humanist Association now awards an annual prize in his name.