Norman Malcolm, one of America's best-known philosophers, was born in Selden, Kansas, in 1911. After studying philosophy with O. K. Bouwsma at the University of Nebraska, he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard in 1933. The decisive period for Malcolm's career, however, was probably the time he spent at Cambridge University in 1938–1939, when he met G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although Moore exerted a strong influence on him, it is perhaps not unfair to say that most of Malcolm's published work was an attempt to understand Wittgenstein, to explain his thought to others, and to apply Wittgenstein's characteristic manner of approaching philosophical questions to areas the latter did not directly treat.

Malcolm's published work deals especially with the nature of necessary truth; empirical certainty; the connections between common sense, ordinary language, and philosophy; knowledge and perception; and such topics in the philosophy of mind...