Michel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths from an armchair. Instead, he prowled through archives of asylums, prisons, and clinics to uncover how modern society quietly defines what is normal and what is deviant. Born Paul-Michel Foucault in nineteen twenty-six in the provincial city of Poitiers, France, he came of age in a country rebuilding after World War Two. He studied philosophy and psychology in the elite halls of Paris, just as existentialist ideas and structuralist theories were buzzing. But Foucault would soon strike off on his own path. By the time of his death in nineteen eighty-four, he had become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, a historian of ideas and social critic whose works unsettled our understanding of sanity, punishment, sexuality, and even the nature of truth.

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Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven. Brilliant and strong-willed, Arendt studied philosophy at university under some of Germany’s greatest thinkers – including Martin Heidegger at Marburg (with whom she had a youthful love affair) and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She completed a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love. But Arendt’s academic career in Germany was cut short by the rise of the Nazis in 1933. As an outspoken Jew, she could no longer live freely in her home country.

Arendt fled to Paris, where she worked aiding Jewish refugees. There she met literary and Zionist circles, married Heinrich Blücher (her second marriage; her first had been brief). When the Nazis invaded France, Arendt was interned in a camp as an “enemy alien” – but she managed to escape. In 1941, she and Blücher secured passage on one of the last ships out of Europe to America.

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Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a rural Catholic town in southwestern Germany. His upbringing was humble; his father was a sexton. Young Heidegger was initially headed for the priesthood – he even started seminary – but he developed an intense interest in philosophy (spurred by reading Brentano) and switched to studying that at the University of Freiburg. He earned his doctorate and then worked under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.

By the 1920s, Heidegger’s own philosophical ideas were taking shape. In 1927, he published Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a groundbreaking and notoriously difficult work. In it, Heidegger essentially asks the question: What is the meaning of Being? Philosophers had long discussed beings (entities), but Heidegger wanted to revive the question of Being itself – what does it mean for something to exist? He starts with the human mode of being, which he calls Dasein (literally “Being-there”).

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