Kai Nielsen (May 15, 1926 – April 7, 2021) was an American professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary.

He got after the Jews.” My mother got up and walked out of the room and, after he had left, she told my father to never let Uncle Percy into the house again.

"[3] In an interview given later in his life, Nielsen explained what had moved him to the "left (I would never have so called it then)" by telling two stories from his childhood about class and race: "I grew up in a little Midwestern American town during the Great Depression where I saw, as a little boy, a number of things that left their mark on me.

But across the ravine from our house lived a bunch of poor people and, as you know kids will do, I used to go home after school with some of my schoolmates to play ball with them.

They don’t have to live off the dole.” It was experiences like this that impressed me and rooted what would become my turn to the left, later my firm socialism.

Nielsen was struggling with religious bel belief at the time, after having read some philosophy during the war: "After the war, I went back to St. Ambrose for two years of college before I transferred to the University of North Carolina.

The other was a layman who came from Montreal and had studied at the University of Toronto – at St. Michael’s College – with Gilson and Maritain.

"[3] Nielsen then transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his A.B.

degree, summa cum laude, with an honors thesis on James Joyce.

[4] During his time at Chapel Hill, Nielsen became radicalized: "The University of North Carolina was not only segregated by race but by gender as well.

I guess there are only two all-male schools left in the United States now [2012], but back then there were a lot of them.

"[3] In the same interview, Nielsen described being the victim of a racist intimidation: "During a U.S. presidential race, Henry Wallace (not George Wallace), who had been vice president under Truman, formed a new party and ran for president.

Paul Robeson, a black and prominent member of the Communist Party, was an articulate supporter of Wallace.

I had seen Paul Robeson play the lead part in Othello in San Francisco during the war when I was still in the service.

We students at Chapel Hill arranged for Paul Robeson to come to campus to talk in support of Wallace and this third party.

The university, after a lot of liberal dithering, finally said we could not meet in the lecture hall we had planned for and with their initial agreement.

So we went to an empty lot that belonged to a gas station in downtown Chapel Hill that had closed for the evening.

[6] Nielsen was a member of the Royal Society of Canada[5] and a past president (in 1983) of the Canadian Philosophical Association.

[9] He wrote or edited over 40 books on topics such as Marxism, metaphilosophy and ethical and political theory.

[5] In 2007, Reason and Emancipation: Essays on the Philosophy of Kai Nielsen, edited by Michel Seymour and Matthias Fritsch, was published, with contributions from Anthony Kenny, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Rorty, and Steven Lukes, among others.

This book was published after a conference in honor of Nielsen was held in October 2003 at Concordia University.