Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber (born 1949) is an American philosopher whose integral theory aims to coordinate insights from premodern, modern, and postmodern traditions across psychology, religion, politics, ecology, and the natural sciences. He has published more than twenty-five books translated into upward of thirty languages and founded the Integral Institute think-tank in 1998.

Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. was born on 31 January 1949 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His father Kenneth Sr. was a U.S. Air Force officer whose postings moved the family to bases in Idaho, Texas, Bermuda, Nebraska, and Illinois. His mother Lucille kept the household and home-schooled him through several relocations.

He entered Duke University in 1967 on a pre-medical scholarship, transferred to the University of Nebraska to study biochemistry, completed a master's degree in biochemistry, and abandoned a doctorate to write full time. He was twenty-three when he drafted The Spectrum of Consciousness, accepted by Quest Books in 1977 after rejection by more than thirty publishers.

He followed it with The Atman Project, Up from Eden, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, A Brief History of Everything, Integral Psychology, the memoir Grace and Grit, and The Religion of Tomorrow. He has lived in Denver since 1987, where he continues to write, podcast, and lead seminars at the Integral Life learning platform he co-founded in 2007.

His name Ken derives from a short form of Kenneth, from the Scottish Gaelic Coinneach meaning "handsome" or "comely." Ken is a masculine name used as a given name in its own right in English-speaking countries since the early twentieth century.