Charles H. Malik was born in Bitirram in the Koura district of north Lebanon in 1906. After attending the Tripoli Boys School, he studied mathematics and physics at the American University of Beirut.

In Cairo, in 1929, he developed an interest in philosophy and, in 1932, studied it under Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard and Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, Germany, but left Germany after 14 months because of its stifling political climate. His doctorate (Ph.D., Harvard, 1937) was on the metaphysics of time in the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger.

On returning to Beirut, he set up a philosophy department and cultural studies programme at the American University. In 1945, he represented Lebanon at the San Francisco conference to found the United Nations. He has served as Lebanon's ambassador to the USA (1945-55); president of the UN Economic and Social Council (1948); rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights (1947-48); Lebanon's Minister of Foreign Affairs (1956-58), Minister of National Education and Fine Arts (1956-57), and MP for the Koura region (1957-60). He chaired the third session of the UN General Assembly's Third Committee in Paris, which drafted the text for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, in 1951, succeeded Mrs Roosevelt as president of the Human Rights Commission. In 1958-59, he was president of the UN General Assembly's thirteenth session.

In 1960, he returned to academic life and taught philosophy at a number of universities in the USA. These included Harvard, the American University in Washington, DC, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Notre Dame University in Indiana. He has been professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut (1962-76) and Jacques Maritain Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Catholic Univer-sity of America in Washington, DC (1981-83). Other posts included president of the World Council on Christian Education (1967-71); vice president of the United Bible Societies (1966-72); and Pascal Lecturer at Waterloo University in Canada (1981). Following the outbreak of war in Lebanon in 1975, Malik helped found the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon, which later became the Lebanese Front.

Malik wrote a number of books and articles. He died in Beirut on 28 December 1987.