Joseph Brenner was born in Paris in 1934, the son of the sculptor Michael Brenner (Lithuania, 1885 – New York, 1969). His primary and secondary education were in New York at the Ethical Culture Schools. He received his B.A. and M.S. degrees from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin. He did post-doctorate work at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1960-1965, he was a polymer chemist at the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Company Wilmington, Delaware laboratory. From 1965 to his retirement in1994, he held assignments in corporate development and technology transfer at the Du Pont Company International in Geneva, primarily in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. In1998 he began a collaboration on the logic of transdisciplinarity with Professor Basarab Nicolescu, President, International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Study (CIRET), Paris. From 2000-2006 he has made  presentations on logic at conferences and seminars in U.S., Romania, Italy, France and Brazil.

His publications include scientific articles (chemistry); collaboration on the Catalogue Raisonné/Biography of Michael Brenner,  papers for CIRET, and “Memoires du XXIe Siècle,” Group 21. Recent work includes “Process in Reality: A Logical Offering”, Logic and Logical Philosophy, Vol. 14, No.2, pp.165-2002, 2005; “A Transconsistent Logic for Model –Based Reasoning,” in L. Magnani (ed.), Model-based Reasoning in Science and Engineering. London:  King's College Publications, 2006, pp. 353-377; and “The Logic of Transdisciplinarity,” in B. Nicolescu (ed.), Transdisciplinarity – Theory and Practice. Hampton Press, 2006. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the New York Academy of Sciences; the Swiss Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Science; and the F. Gonseth Association, Switzerland.