Kevin R. D. Shepherd: Biographical Note
Kevin R. D. Shepherd was born in Cambridge in 1950. From January 1981 until the early 1990s, and with a reference from Corpus Christi College, he undertook a private research project at Cambridge University Library, where he accumulated many notebooks. His first book was Psychology in Science (1983), and related to the history of science. Independent in his activities, he formulated an interdisciplinary approach called anthropography in his preliminary work Meaning in Anthropos (1991). He has referred to this approach in terms of the philosophy of culture, distinguishing his version of anthropography from ethnography. During the 1980s he established IRCA (Intercultural Research Centre of Anthropography) in Cambridge, though subsequently he decided to dispense with any organisational format. He became tagged as a “serious amateur,” a phrase in unofficial use at Cambridge and Oxford Universities that describes a writer who does not hold academic honours but who does attempt serious work with annotations. In that capacity he wrote a book extending to a thousand pages (Minds and Sociocultures Vol. One, 1995), and supplemented by an unpublished second volume.
His output as a whole ranges over philosophy, history of religion, social criticism, and other subjects. He has improvised the phrase “citizen sociology” to describe basic analyses (see the introduction to Some Philosophical Critiques and Appraisals, 2004, page ix). Yet he has described himself not as a scholar or a sociologist, but as a “citizen philosopher,” a phrase associated with his book Pointed Observations (2005), which includes chapters on Hume and Spinoza. The sub-title of that book is Critical reflections of a citizen philosopher on contemporary pseudomysticism, alternative therapy, David Hume, Spinoza, and other subjects.
During the 1990s he lived in Moray, Scotland, where he was in a position to survey some “new age” trends relating to the Findhorn Foundation, which he refused to join. He subsequently moved to Dorset, where he created the publishing venture called Citizen Initiative, subsequently to become an internet activity. The Citizen Initiative website was uploaded on August 31st 2007, and represents his concession that the internet can be a means of providing relevant information, whatever the distractions predominating. His second website was uploaded on September 23rd 2008 at kevinrdshepherd.net. This features 25 articles of a broad-ranging content. His third website was uploaded on August 17th 2009 at kevinrdshepherd.info. The fourth website followed on November 17th 2009 at independentphilosophy.net. The blog On Philosophy likewise commenced in November 2009. The fifth website is citizenphilosophy.net, uploaded on January 9th 2010.