Edward Payson Evans (December 8, 1831 – March 6, 1917) was an American scholar, linguist, educator, and early advocate for animal rights.

[5] On his return to the United States, he became professor of modern languages at the University of Michigan.

[5] In 1868, he married Elizabeth Edson Gibson,[6] and in 1870, Evans resigned his position at Michigan to travel abroad again, where he gathered materials for a history of German literature,[5] and made a specialty of studying oriental languages.

[4] Evans' wife died in 1911 and when the First World War broke out in 1914, he returned to the United States, where he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.

[10] Environmental historian Roderick Nash argues that both Evans and J. Howard Moore, "deserve more recognition than they have received as the first professional philosophers in the United States to look beyond anthropocentrism.