Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born on September 5, 1888, at Tiruttani, forty miles to the north-east of Madras, in South India. He was born into a poor Brahmin family. His father Sarvepalli Veeraswami was employed on a meager salary in the zamindari. His mother's name was Sitamma. Radhakrishnan's father found it very difficult to educate his son with his meagre income. He also had a large family to take care of.

But little Radhakrishnan was a brilliant boy. His father did not want him to learn English or go to school. Instead he wanted him to become a priest. However, the talents of the boy were so outstanding that his father finally decided to send him to school at Tiruttani itself. He was highly intelligent and he went through most of his education on scholarships. After his initial schooling in Tiruttani, he joined the Lutheran Mission School in Tirupati for his high school.

When Radhakrishnan was 16 years old, he joined the Voorhee's College in Vellore. At the same age, his parents got him married to Sivakamuamma while he was still studying at Vellore.  From Vellore he switched to the Madras Christian College at the age of 17. He chose philosophy as his major and attained a B.A. and M.A. in the field.

He graduated with a Master's Degree in Arts from Madras University. In partial fulfillment for his M.A. degree, Radhakrishnan wrote a thesis on the ethics of the Vedanta titled "The Ethics of the Vedanta and Its Metaphysical Presuppositions", which was a reply to the charge that the Vedanta system had no room for ethics. Professor A.G. Hogg awarded the following testimonial for this thesis:

In 1918, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in the University of Mysore. Three years later, he was appointed to the most important philosophy chair in India, King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science in the University of Calcutta. Radhakrishnan represented University of Calcutta at the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire in June 1926 and the International Congress of Philosophy at the Harvard University in September 1926. At the Philosophical Congress held at Harvard University, the lack of spiritual note in modern civilization was the focus of his address to the general meeting.

Aldous Huxley observed that Dr. Radhakrishnan "is the master of words and no words."

Prof. H.N. Muirhead said, "Dr. Radhakrishnan has the rare qualification of being equally versed in the great European and the not less great Asiatic tradition which may be said to hold in solution between them the spiritual wisdom of the world, and of thus speaking as a philosophical bi linguist upon it."

George P. Conger said, "Among the philosophers of our time, no one has achieved so much in so many fields as has Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan of India ... William James was influential in religion, and John Dewey has been a force in politics. One or two American philosophers have been legislators. Jacques Maritain has been an ambassador. Radhakrishnan, in a little more than thirty years of work, has done all these things and more... Never in the history of philosophy has there been quite such a world-figure. With his unique appointment at Banaras and Oxford, like a weaver's shuttle, he has gone to and fro between the East and West, carrying a thread of understanding, weaving it into the fabric of civilization."

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan passed away on April 17, 1975. In India, September 5 (his birthday) is celebrated as Teacher's Day in his honor. Radhakrishnan along with Ghanshyam Das Birla and a few other Social Workers in the pre-independence era formed Krishnarpan Charity Trust.

Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's letter to Prof. Paul Arthur Schilpp, the editor of The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan: