Leo Tolstoy was born Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy on September 9, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate in Tula Province, Russia. He was born into an aristocratic world of land, servants, privilege, and inherited rank, but his childhood was marked…

Carl Edward Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a working-class Jewish family whose life was far removed from observatories, spacecraft, and academic fame. His father, Samuel Sagan, had immigrated from Ukraine…

Clarence Irving Lewis, usually known as C. I. Lewis, was born on April 12, 1883, in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He came from modest circumstances, far from the old image of philosophy as a leisure pursuit for the privileged. His father worked…

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was born on November 8, 1848, in Wismar, then part of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in northern Germany. His father, Alexander Frege, directed a girls’ school, and his mother, Auguste Bialloblotzky Frege, also had connections to education. Frege grew…

William David Ross was born on April 15, 1877, in Thurso, Scotland, but his earliest childhood was partly spent far from Scotland, in Travancore, India, where his father served as principal of Maharaja’s College. Ross later returned to Scotland for…

John Bordley Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a prosperous family shaped by law, civic life, and public responsibility. His father was a lawyer, and Rawls grew up in a world where institutions, duty, and…

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, a town that would become the physical and spiritual center of his life. He was the son of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia…

Richard Mervyn Hare, known professionally as R. M. Hare and personally as Dick Hare, was born on March 21, 1919, at Backwell Down, near Bristol, England. He came from a comfortable English family, but his childhood was marked by loss.…

Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into one of the most intellectually distinguished families in nineteenth-century America. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was a celebrated Harvard mathematician and astronomer, and the young Peirce grew up…

Pyrrho of Elis was born sometime around 365–360 BCE in the Greek city of Elis, in the northwestern Peloponnese. Unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Epicurus, he left behind no school texts, systematic treatises, or dialogues. His biography is therefore difficult to…

George Edward Moore was born on November 4, 1873, in South London, and became one of the most influential British philosophers of the twentieth century. He disliked the names George Edward and is usually remembered simply as G. E. Moore.…

Alvin Ira Goldman was born on October 1, 1938, and became one of the most important American epistemologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He entered philosophy at a time when traditional theories of knowledge were under intense…