Stephan Körner, FBA (26 September 1913 – 17 August 2000[a]) was a British philosopher, who specialised in the work of Kant, the study of concepts, and in the philosophy of mathematics.

His father had studied classics in Vienna, while at the same time, winning prizes in mathematics to supplement his meagre income (a fellow student was a certain Leon Trotsky, who was frequently asked, "When is that great revolution that you are always talking about going to happen?").

After German troops moved into the country in March 1939, a schoolmate of his, an officer in the SS, warned the Jewish family that life in German-occupied Moravia was no longer safe.

Stephan travelled with two friends, Otto Eisner and Willi Haas, through Poland to the United Kingdom, arriving a refugee just as the Second World War began.

He received a small grant to continue his education at the University of Cambridge, where he studied philosophy under R. B. Braithwaite at Trinity Hall; among others, he was taught by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Such invitations were welcome since Stephan made little money as a waiter in a Greek restaurant and survived on "one fourpenny meat pie per day."

He would later say that he survived the fighting outside Dunkirk due to Dickens; recuperating in hospital from a minor wound, a doctor refused to discharge him until he had had another day to finish his novel.

In 1957 he expanded on this, editing Observation and Interpretation, a collection of papers arising from a seminar which brought together both philosophers and physicists to discuss these questions.

In their early married life they fitted the conventional academic mould – whilst he worked incessantly at his studies, she raised the family, looked after the house, managed the finances – but after the children had grown and left she worked at her own career, eventually becoming the chairman of the magistrates' court in Bristol and overseeing the redevelopment of the National Health Service's information-management system.

Edith managed their lives, as with everything else, in a practical, organised and forceful way, ensuring that he could work as freely as possible; he was fond of saying that "Diti does everything, but leaves the philosophy to me".

[2] The couple had two children – Thomas, a professor of mathematics, and Ann, a biochemist, writer and translator,[8] who married Sidney Altman (a joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989).