 Wesley Charles Salmon was born in Detroit on 9 August 1925, to Wallis, a mechanical and electrical engineer, and Ruth Springer Salmon, a schoolteacher. After completing primary and secondary school in Detroit, and studying at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) from 1943–44, in 1944 Salmon moved to the University of Chicago. Taken with admiration for the charismatic minister of his family’s Methodist church, Salmon entered the University of Chicago Divinity School with the intention to become a minister himself. However, as he writes in the autobiographical note published in What? Where? When? Why? (1982), once in Chicago he left his “belief in virtually every tenet of Christianity, as well as all confidence in the social value of religion” (Salmon 1982c: 281). He then decided to turn to philosophy and in 1947 obtained his MA in Philosophy with a thesis on Whitehead’s conception of freedom.