Joseph Weizenbaum was born on January 8, 1923, in Berlin, Germany, into a Jewish family whose life was transformed by the rise of Nazism. In 1936, when he was still a boy, his family fled Germany and immigrated to the…

Andy Clark was born in 1957 and became one of the most influential philosophers of mind and cognitive science of his generation. Trained at the University of Stirling, where he earned both a B.A. and a doctorate, Clark entered philosophy…

Antonio Damasio was born on February 25, 1944, in Lisbon, Portugal, and became one of the most influential neuroscientists of the modern era. His intellectual formation began in medicine rather than abstract philosophy, but the questions that would define his…

Allen Newell was born on March 19, 1927, in San Francisco, California, into a family that valued science, research, and broad intellectual curiosity. His father, Robert R. Newell, was a distinguished radiologist at Stanford Medical School, and the younger Newell…

Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London, into a British family connected to imperial service and conventional education. From childhood, however, Turing’s mind moved in unconventional directions. He was fascinated by numbers, chemistry, machines, natural patterns,…

Meister Eckhart was born around 1260 in Hochheim, near Gotha in Thuringia, in what is now Germany. His birth name was Johannes Eckhart, and the title “Meister” reflects his later status as a master of theology. Very little is known…

John Rogers Searle was born on July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado, and became one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His father worked in electrical engineering and business, and his mother…

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1723 and was baptized on June 5 of that year. His father, also named Adam Smith, had died before he was born, and Smith was raised by his mother, Margaret Douglas, with…

Martha Craven Nussbaum was born on May 6, 1947, in New York City, and grew up in a world of education, discipline, culture, and social expectation. Her father, George Craven, was a lawyer, and her childhood moved through the privileged…

Amartya Kumar Sen was born on November 3, 1933, in Santiniketan, Bengal, in British India. He grew up in an unusually intellectual environment shaped by education, literature, public debate, and the humanist legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, who had founded Visva-Bharati…

Robert Nozick was born on November 16, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish family whose background connected him to the immigrant experience and the intense intellectual life of mid-century New York. As a teenager, he discovered philosophy through…

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and became one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. Unlike many philosophers who began from logic, metaphysics, or moral theory, Kuhn began from…