Origins and Formative Education
Sloman was born in 1936, in the town of Que Que (now called Kwe Kwe), in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Although Sloman describes himself as an Atheist, his parents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the century. He went to school in Cape Town between 1948 and 1953, then earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cape Town in 1956, after which a Rhodes Scholarship (from South African College School) took him to Oxford University (first Balliol College, and then St Antony's College). In Oxford, he became interested in philosophy after a brief period studying mathematical logic supervised by Hao Wang, eventually ending up with a DPhil (thesis entitled 'Knowing and Understanding' never published) in philosophy defending the ideas of Immanuel Kant about the nature of mathematical knowledge as non-empirical and non-analytic (completed in 1962).
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