[3] He was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for Social Research.

[10] Kurtz was left-wing in his youth, but has said that serving in the United States Army in World War II taught him the dangers of ideology.

He saw the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps after they were liberated, and became disillusioned with Communism when he encountered Russian slave laborers who had been taken to Nazi Germany by force but refused to return to the Soviet Union at the end of the war.

Kurtz used the publicity generated by fundamentalist preachers to grow the membership of the Council for Secular Humanism, as well as strip the religious aspects found in the earlier humanist movement.

There are now some 40 Centers and Communities[clarification needed] worldwide, including in Los Angeles, Washington, New York City, London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Moscow, Beijing, Hyderabad, Toronto, Dakar, Buenos Aires and Kathmandu.

Like Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, James Randi, Ray Hyman and others, Kurtz has popularized scientific skepticism and critical thinking about claims of the paranormal.

In my book by that name, I present the thesis that paranormal and religious phenomena have similar functions in human experience; they are expressions of a tendency to accept magical thinking.

[22]In The Transcendental Temptation, Kurtz analyzes how provable are the claims of Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad, as well as the founders of religions on American soil such as Joseph Smith and Ellen White.

[25] Kurtz coined the term eupraxsophy (originally eupraxophy) to refer to philosophies or life stances such as secular humanism, Confucianism and Taoism that do not rely on belief in the transcendent or supernatural.

[26] In June 2010, the State University of New York at Buffalo announced the establishment of the Paul Kurtz Lecture Series.

The series will bring notable speakers to the university's campus in Amherst, New York, to speak on topics relevant to the philosophy of humanism and philosophical naturalism.

Kurtz had made the bequest and charitable gift annuity to the university, where he taught from 1965 to 1991, to help promote the development of critical intelligence in future generations of SUNY at Buffalo students.

On November 5, 2010, the university announced that cognitive scientist Steven Pinker would inaugurate the new Paul Kurtz Lecture Series on December 2, 2010.

Paul Kurtz conceived of the Institute for Science and Human Values in 2009 as yet another branch of the umbrella group, the Center for Inquiry.