He was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 16, 1935, to Georg Clemens Schwyzer, a physician, and Elisabeth Schuh Schwyzer. The family was forced to leave Austria nine months after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938. Hubert grew up in England and attended a Jesuit boarding school before joining the Royal Air Force, where he served from 1953 to 1955. He received a degree in philosophy from Reading University in 1958. In 1959 he came to the United States for graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley and earned his doctorate in 1968. He taught at the University of Alberta for two years from 1963 to 1965, and then at University of California, Santa Barbara from 1965 until his retirement in 2002.