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 published in 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). During the 1980s he established IRCA (Intercultural Research Centre of Anthropography) in Cambridge, though subsequently he decided to dispense with all official formats. He became tagged as a “serious amateur,” a phrase in 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 One), and which has an extension in an unpublished second volume. His output as a whole ranges over philosophy, history of religion, social criticism, and other subjects. In response to the exclusiveness of academic departmentalism, 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. 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. His latest books exhibit a wide range of subject matter. 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.