Robin Le Poidevin

Le Poidevin was educated at Repton School and Oriel College Oxford, where he graduated with a B.A. (1984, converted to M.A., 1988) in Psychology and Philosophy. He took a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1989). He was Gifford Research Fellow in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews, 1988-89. He was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at the University of Leeds in 1989, where he taught until 2022. He was the 2007 Stanton Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge^[2] and the 2012 Alan Richardson Fellow in Theology at the University of Durham.^[3] From 2010 to 2015 he was Editor of Religious Studies,^[4] and is a past President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion.^[5]

Le Poidevin has defended both agnosticism^[6] and religious fictionalism^[7] in his writings on religion, and the B-theory of time (which denies the reality of temporal passage) in his writings on metaphysics.^[8]

In 2025 he was approved for award of the degree of Doctor of Letters (Litt.D.) by the University of Cambridge.^[9]

• Change, Cause and Contradiction: A Defence of the Tenseless Theory of Time, London: Macmillan, 1991. ISBN 978-0333542866
• Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 978-0415093385
• Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0198752554
• The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0199575510
• Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0199575268
• Religious Fictionalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1108558198
• And Was Made Man: Mind, Metaphysics and Incarnation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN 978-0199676576

• The Philosophy of Time (co-edited with Murray MacBeath), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780198239994
• Questions of Time and Tense, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 9780199250462
• Being: Developments in Contemporary Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 9780521735445
• The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics (co-edited with Peter Simons, Ross Cameron and Andrew McGonigal, London: Routledge, 2009. ISBN 9780415396318

• The Experience and Perception of Time (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)^[10]
• ‘Why I am Agnostic’, in Mark Lamport, ed, The Rowman and Littlefield Handbook of Philosophy and Religion, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022.^[11]
• For a fuller list, see:
  • Robin Le Poidevin (University of Leeds) - PhilPeople
  • Robin Le Poidevin - Google Scholar