소개
Born in Montreal in 1954, Pinker took a PhD in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1979 and taught at MIT for two decades before returning to Harvard in 2003 as Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. His early academic work — on irregular verbs, language acquisition, and the computational structure of the mind — established him as a central figure in modern cognitive science.
From the late 1990s onward his writing moved from primarily academic to broadly public, defending rationalist and Enlightenment values across a series of works on violence, reason, and progress. The throughline of his public intellectual project is that human flourishing has measurably improved over centuries, that the improvement is driven by science and institutional reason, and that the most serious contemporary risk is the erosion of those tools from both political flanks.
His positions on biological constraints, declining violence, and academic politics have drawn sustained criticism from segments of the academic left; in turn he has been a sharp critic of what he describes as fashionable irrationalism in the humanities. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages.