Born after World War II in the forties, Jim O’Brien grew up a baby boomer in a middle class suburb of Chicago. In high school, he was an athlete and played on the varsity high school basketball and football teams. He served his country in the United States Army during the sixties in South Korea on the DMZ. While in Korea, he earned his Black Belt in Judo. Upon returning stateside with an honorable discharge, Jim went to DePaul University where he earned his BA in physical education. Soon after, he entered Northeastern Illinois University where he earned his master’s degree in special education with a specialization in learning disabilities.

Jim spent the majority of his teaching career working as a special education teacher at John Marshall High School on Chicago's West Side. He specialized in teaching mathematics and social studies to students with learning disabilities. During his tenure as an educator, he was known as a natural teacher with a gift for connecting with his students.

In his personal life, Jim loved traveling and exploring the unknown; he was an avid wilderness camper and hiker, and a lover of animals both wild and domesticated. He adored classical music, especially Mozart, Bach, Mahler, and Paganini. A vegetarian, he delighted in discovering new foods and restaurants; he had an Irish zeal for beer. When he laughed, his mirth crescendoed madly in Pythagorean intervals, infecting everyone within hearing distance.

Jim O’Brien’s intellectual horizon spread across humankind to the very beginning of human thought. Philosophy was his true passion and his vocation. He read voraciously, writing volumes of notes and essays on topics and issues that piqued his curiosity and inflamed his need to explore and understand. He loved to talk to others and hear their opinions. More than anything else, he loved debating with a willing and able opponent. He spoke of Thoreau, Emerson, Aristotle, Descartes, and Buckminster Fuller with intimate affection as if they were dear friends lounging in the very next room. To Jim, all knowledge came from logic and thinking; to seek knowledge was the purest pursuit. In the fall of 1994, with the encouragement of Professor Sherman Stanage, the philosophy department chair, Jim entered the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Northern Illinois University.

Jim believed in freedom as a fundamental value. It is through the lens of freedom that he conducted his archaeological analysis of peace in The Archaeology of Peace. His Ph.D. thesis surely would have explored and resonated this theme.