Ernst Tugendhat was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1930, but in 1938, because of the Nazi invasion of the country, his family emigrated to Switzerland and in 1941 to Venezuela. From 1946 to 1949 he studied classical philology at Stanford University.

From 1949 to 1956 he studied philosophy at Freiburg University in Germany, where he earned the doctorate with a dissertation on Aristotle (“Die Zwiefältigkeit des Seins bei Aristoteles,” [The Twofoldness of Being in Aristotle], 1956), which he published as Ti kata tinos. Eine Untersuchung zu Struktur und Ursprung aristotelicher Grundbegriffe [Saying Something About Something: An Investigation of the Structure and Origin of Basic Concepts in Aristotle] (Freiburg: Alber, 1958). He earned his habilitation (the licence to teach in German universities) in 1966 with a work that he published as Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger [The Notion of Truth in Husserl and Heidegger] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967).

From 1966 until 1975 he taught philosophy at Heidelberg University, and from 1975 to 1980 he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute. From 1980 to 1992 he was professor of philology at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Thereafter he was a guest professor in Chile, Constance, and Prague, and at Gioânia and Porto Alegre in Brazil. Since 1999 he has resided in Tübingen, where he is an honorary professor at the university.