Frederick Charles Copleston SJ CBE FBA was a British Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy.
Copleston achieved a degree of popularity in the media for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer.