Steven Pinker obtained his PhD in experimental psychology at Harvard University. He was a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for twenty-one years before returning to Harvard in 2003.

The author of popular works aimed at both scientists and the general public, he is particularly well known as an ardent defender of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of the mind. He argues that language corresponds to an ‘instinct’, in other words an innate faculty whose biological adaptation has been shaped by natural selection. Another aspect of his work concerns the process of language learning in children, which led him to attribute a biological basis to linguist Noam Chomsky’s concept of universal grammar.

Steven Pinker has been involved in debates in the field of language sciences since the late 1980s. While the question of human nature has occupied him a great deal, he has also devoted two monographs to psycholinguistics and psychologically based stylistics. Despite its diversity, there is a common thread running through Steven Pinker’s work: the idea of the universality of the human mind, rooted in mental processes shared by the whole of humanity and features common to all the world’s languages, ancient or modern, despite their phonological, morphological and syntactic disparity.

His book “The blank Slate”, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, deals with “the modern denial of human nature”. “The better Angels of our Nature”, a major book demonstrating that we are living in the least violent, least cruel and most peaceful era in the history of our species, has also been a huge success. In 2004, Steven Pinker was named one of the hundred most influential people by Time Magazine. He is now one of the world’s most influential intellectuals, and takes a cautiously optimistic view of the decades ahead.