Brian Cantwell Smith

Brian Cantwell Smith (November 29, 1950 – September 6, 2025) was a Canadian-American philosopher and cognitive scientist whose work spanned cognitive science, computer science, information science, and philosophy. He was known for introducing the concept of computational reflection in programming languages, and for influential contributions to the philosophy of computing, ontology, epistemology, and the foundations of artificial intelligence.

Smith was a founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, and the first president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Smith served as principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1980s and later held faculty positions at Indiana University, Duke University, and the University of Toronto, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Information from 2003 to 2008 and later held the Reid Hoffman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Human.