Jacob Needleman (October 6, 1934 – November 28, 2022) was an American philosopher, author, and religious scholar.

[4] He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at San Francisco State University[5][6] and is said to have "popularized the term 'new religious movements'.

[9][10] Needleman also narrated classical religious texts in audiobook format, including the Taoist Tao Te Ching and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita.

At Talks at Google[11] in 2007, Needleman said, "A philosopher deals with the great unanswerable questions, which I think have answers, but not usually in the state of being that we're asking them.

And since we are a culture that has gravitated toward, the center of gravity of most of our personalities, is the intellect, these questions seem to be intrinsically unanswerable and the response to these questions has to be not just in words or in interesting insights, but in the movement down from the mind to make contact with the heart and the body, which, when they work together, are like another intelligence.

Well, if you ponder that a little bit, you'll come to the conclusion very clearly that the right of free speech implies the duty of allowing others to speak.

In a 1990 A World of Ideas Interview[13] with Bill Moyers, Needleman said, "There's always been greed, there's always been avarice.

Later scientific discoveries have more or less confirmed that there's more livingness in the universe than was thought thirty or forty years ago."

[16] Needleman authored articles, interviewed and wrote 24 books in a writing career that began in 1970.