Annette Baier was born in New Zealand in 1929. She received her bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees from the University of Otago, and, in 1954, her bachelor of philosophy degree from Oxford, writing a thesis on precision in poetry under J. L. Austin. After teaching in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, Baier moved to the United States, teaching first at Carnegie Mellon and then at the University of Pittsburgh from 1973 until her retirement as Distinguished Service Professor in 1997.

Baier's primary commitment is to naturalism: Human beings are evolved animals and we must understand our capacities, both intellectual and moral, in the light of this natural history. Baier finds philosophers guilty of a kind of willful forgetting of the facts of our embodied existence. We are social animals who experience long periods of dependency in infancy and childhood, and even the more...