Born in 1930 and educated in New Zealand and at the University of Oxford, Jonathan Bennett taught philosophy at the University of Cambridge for twelve years before taking up professorial positions in Canada (at the University of British Columbia) and the United States (at Syracuse University). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. Now retired, he continues to write from his home on an island near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Bennett's work covers a wide range of issues in analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy, especially the early modern period. His first book, Rationality (1964), explored the differences between human intelligence and the intellectual capacities of other animals, and the role of language in these differences. Subsequently influenced by Paul Grice's seminal work on meaning and communicative intentions, he significantly modified his views about such matters...