Aaron Sloman

Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He is the author of several papers on philosophy, epistemology and artificial intelligence. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. He has collaborated with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence. Since retiring he is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham.

Sloman was born in 1936, in the town of Que Que (now called Kwe Kwe), in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His parents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the century, Sloman describes himself as an atheist. He went to school in Cape Town between 1948 and 1953, then earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cape Town in 1956, after which a Rhodes Scholarship (from South African College School) took him to Oxford University (first Balliol College, and then St Antony's College). In Oxford, he became interested in philosophy after a brief period studying mathematical logic supervised by Hao Wang, eventually ending up with a DPhil (thesis entitled 'Knowing and Understanding' never published) in philosophy defending the ideas of Immanuel Kant about the nature of mathematical knowledge as non-empirical and non-analytic (completed in 1962).

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