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…

Aristophanes was born in Athens sometime between about 460 and 450 BCE, during the height of the city’s cultural and political power. Little is known with certainty about his family or private life, though ancient evidence identifies his father as…

Xenophon was born in Athens around 430 BCE, into a world shaped by the Peloponnesian War, civic instability, and the decline of Athenian imperial power. He belonged to a relatively comfortable family, often associated with the equestrian class, and he…

Thomas Bayes was born in 1701 or 1702, in or near London, into a prominent English Nonconformist family. His father, Joshua Bayes, was a Presbyterian minister and respected dissenting theologian at a time when Nonconformists lived outside the full privileges…

George Boole was born on November 2, 1815, in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, into a modest family far from the elite universities that usually produced nineteenth-century mathematicians. His father, John Boole, was a shoemaker with a strong interest in science, mathematics,…

Alfred Tarski was born Alfred Tajtelbaum, often rendered Teitelbaum, on January 14, 1901, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. He grew up in a well-educated Jewish family during a period of enormous political and intellectual change in Poland.…

David Hilbert was born on January 23, 1862, in Königsberg, Prussia, a city already famous in intellectual history as the home of Immanuel Kant. Hilbert grew up in a world where German universities were becoming centers of modern mathematical research,…

Kurt Friedrich Gödel was born on April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, now Brno in the Czech Republic. He grew up in a prosperous German-speaking family, the son of Rudolf Gödel, a textile manager, and Marianne Handschuh Gödel. As a…

Jeremy Bentham was born on February 15, 1748, in Spitalfields, London, and became one of the most influential moral, legal, and political reformers of the modern age. He was a child prodigy from a prosperous legal family, reportedly reading serious…

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hannover, Germany, and was raised in Königsberg in a secular German Jewish family. She grew up in a cultivated household marked by books, politics, and the shocks of twentieth-century history. Her…

Cass R. Sunstein was born in 1954 and became one of the most influential legal scholars, political theorists, and public-policy thinkers of the modern era. His work reaches across constitutional law, administrative law, behavioral economics, risk regulation, free speech, democratic…

Margaret Gilbert was born in 1942 in the United Kingdom and became one of the most important contemporary philosophers of social life. Her work belongs to social ontology, moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and the philosophy of action,…