Arne Naess is a noted mountaineer and philosopher and the founder of the deep ecology movement. He was born to Ragnar and Christine Naess in Oslo, Norway, on January 27, 1912, the youngest of five children. Naess was an introspective child, and he displayed an early interest in logic and philosophy. After undergraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris, he did graduate work at the University of Vienna, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oslo. While in Vienna, his interests in logic, language, and methodology drew him to the Vienna Circle of logical empiricism. He was awarded the Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oslo in 1938.

A year later, in 1939, Naess was made full professor of philosophy at the same university. He promptly reorganized Norwegian higher education, making the history of...