The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and community outreach. Considered the country's first learned society, it has played an important role in American cultural and intellectual life for over 270 years.

Through research grants, published journals, the upkeep of the American Philosophical Society Museum, an extensive library, and regular meetings, the society continues to advance careful study in a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and the sciences. The museum is located immediately east of Independence Hall and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966. It is part of the Independence National Historical Park.

Originally called "Philosophical Society" and founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, along with co-founder John Bartram, the discussion group was an offshoot of his earlier club, the Junto. It was founded two years after the University of Pennsylvania and the institutions remain closely tied.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity, operating on a wholly independent and non-party-political basis and providing public benefit throughout Scotland. Established in 1783, it has since then drawn upon the strengths and expertise of its Fellows, of which there are currently more than 1500.

The Society covers a broader selection of fields than the Royal Society of London including literature and history. Unlike similar organisations in the rest of the UK, the Fellowship includes people from a wide range of disciplines - science & technology, arts, humanities, medicine, social science, business and public service. This breadth of expertise makes the Royal Society of Edinburgh unique in the UK.

At the start of the 18th century, Edinburgh's intellectual climate fostered many clubs and societies (see Scottish Enlightenment). Though there were several that treated the arts, sciences and medicine, the most prestigious was the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge, commonly referred to as the Medical Society of Edinburgh, co-founded by the mathematician Colin Maclaurin in 1731.

A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or dominance patterns in subgroups.

Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social (common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to overlap.

A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant, larger society. This is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology.

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎) (born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in prospect theory.

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller.

Currently, he is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven; May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics.

Nussbaum, though not a lawyer, is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown.

Nussbaum was born in New York City, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker; during her teenage years, Nussbaum attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr. She described her upbringing as "East Coast WASP elite...very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status". She would later credit her impatience with "mandarin philosophers" as the "repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida".