Thomas Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, now Serbia, to a family that soon emigrated to the United States. He became a naturalized American citizen as a child and was raised in and around New York.…

Jerry Alan Fodor was born on April 22, 1935, in New York City. He came of age during a period when American philosophy was strongly shaped by analytic method, behaviorism, linguistics, and the rise of computer science. These were exactly…

David John Chalmers was born on April 20, 1966, in Sydney, Australia, and grew up in Sydney and Adelaide. Before he became one of the most famous philosophers of mind in the world, he was drawn to mathematics, puzzles, systems,…

Gilbert Ryle was born on August 19, 1900, in Brighton, Sussex, England, into a large, educated, intellectually lively family. His father was a physician with interests in philosophy and astronomy, and Ryle grew up with access to books, conversation, and…

Francis Bacon was born on January 22, 1561, in London, into a family close to the center of Elizabethan power. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, served as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth I, and his mother,…

Paul Ricoeur was born on February 27, 1913, in Valence, France, into a Protestant family marked early by loss. His mother died when he was still an infant, and his father was killed during the First World War in 1915.…

Homer stands at the beginning of Western literature, yet almost nothing certain is known about his life. Ancient tradition remembered him as a blind poet, a wandering singer, and the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but modern scholarship…

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet on November 21, 1694, in Paris, into a prosperous bourgeois family connected to the world of law, administration, and letters. His father wanted him to pursue a respectable legal career, but the young Arouet wanted…

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was born on March 20, 1770, in Lauffen am Neckar in Württemberg, in southwestern Germany. His early life was marked by loss. His father died when Hölderlin was still very young, and his stepfather also died…

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on May 19, 1762, in Rammenau, a village in Saxony, into a poor and deeply religious family of ribbon weavers. His rise into philosophy was unlikely. He did not inherit wealth, rank, or academic security.…

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in Toruń, a prosperous city on the Vistula River in Royal Prussia, then under the Polish crown. He was the youngest child of Nicolaus Copernicus Sr., a merchant, and Barbara Watzenrode, whose…

Plotinus was born around 204 or 205 CE, probably in Lycopolis in Egypt, and became the central figure in the philosophical movement later known as Neoplatonism. Little is known with certainty about his early life, partly because he disliked talking…