John Perry was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on the 16th of January, 1943. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Doane College in 1964 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1968. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1999.
Perry is currently Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. In 2004, he became co-host, with Kenneth Taylor, of Philosophy Talk, the radio program that "questions everything... except your intelligence". He is also part of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)—an independent research center founded in 1983. CSLI Center for the Study of Language and Information - Stanford University
Perry has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. However, Perry also produces non-technical work that reaches a wider audience, such as his humorous 1995 online essay "Structured Procrastination". Structured Procrastination
Perry's 1978 book A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, deals with standard problems in the theory of personal identity in the form of a dialogue between a terminally ill university professor, Gretchen Weirob, and her two friends, Sam Miller and Dave Cohen. The views represented include those of Bernard Williams, John Locke, and Derek Parfit. The format of associating different philosophical positions with different characters in a dialogue recalls David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
In logic, Perry and Jon Barwise are known for discussion of the slingshot argument, especially in their 1981 article "Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations".
In his 2001 book Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness, Perry argues for what he calls "antecedent physicalism", according to which physicalism is antecedently taken to be a plausible and reasonable position, provided that there are no better rival theories. Thus, Perry defends a version of type physicalism against three major philosophical arguments for dualism: the zombie argument, the knowledge argument, and the modal argument.