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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Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy wool merchant. His father was stern, deeply pious, and prone to guilt and melancholy – traits he passed to Søren. Kierkegaard grew up in a house haunted by a sense of sin and religious intensity (his father believed he’d cursed their family by an impious act as a boy, and indeed many of Søren’s siblings died young, fueling that tragic belief).

Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He wasn’t a diligent student at first – he spent a lot of time in the social scene of the city, writing satirical pieces and developing his wit. But tragedy and introspection in his mid-twenties (especially his father’s death) spurred him to find purpose.

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Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village in Saxony (now Germany). His father was a Lutheran pastor who died young; Nietzsche was raised in a pious household of women (mother, sister, grandmother). A precocious student, he excelled in classical philology (the study of Greek and Roman texts). At 24, he became a professor at Basel, Switzerland – extraordinarily young. But academic life didn’t suit his fiery spirit for long. He was deeply influenced by composer Richard Wagner (they were friends for a time) and by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (the idea of life as driven by irrational will).

Nietzsche’s own philosophy began with works like The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he introduced his famous dichotomy of the Apollonian (order, reason, beauty) vs Dionysian (chaos, passion, ecstasy) elements in Greek tragedy – reflecting his view that life needs both structure and wild creativity, and that modern society was too Apollonian, suppressing the Dionysian vital force.

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Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, a provincial capital on the Baltic Sea (today Kaliningrad). He was raised in a modest artisanal family and educated in a pietistic Lutheran tradition that stressed duty and virtue. Young Kant was intellectually precocious. He studied at the University of Königsberg (never venturing more than a hundred miles from his birthplace his entire life). After some years as a private tutor, he became a professor at Königsberg and taught there for four decades.

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A stout, rosy-cheeked old man lies propped up in bed, greeting his visitor with a gentle smile. It is the summer of 1776 in Edinburgh, and David Hume knows he is dying. Yet there is no fear in his clear grey eyes—only mild amusement at the anxious expression on young James Boswell’s face. Boswell has come to see whether the great skeptic is frightened to meet his Maker at last. But Hume, ever composed, chuckles softly. He spins an imaginary tale for Boswell: perhaps, he says, he might bargain with Charon, the ferryman of Hades, to grant him a few more years of life.

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Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family. Her father was a traditionalist who once ruefully said, “Simone thinks like a man!” – noticing her fierce intellect. Beauvoir was indeed precocious and very independent-minded. After World War I, her family lost much of its wealth, but they still prioritized a good education for Simone. Deeply religious as a child, Beauvoir experienced a loss of faith in adolescence and thereafter declared herself an atheist – but one with a strong sense of ethical drive.

Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where in 1929 she became the youngest person (and only woman that year) to pass the agrégation in philosophy, coming second in the nation.

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Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was an infant, so he was raised by his mother in his maternal grandfather’s home. As a child, he was small, sickly, and partially blind in one eye (which gave him his signature walleyed look). But he was precocious and developed an early love of literature. Sartre studied philosophy at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, a fellow philosophy student who would become his life-long companion and intellectual collaborator (their open partnership – they never married – became nearly as famous as their ideas).

Sartre’s early intellectual development was shaped by reading philosophers like Descartes, Kant, and notably the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and existentialist Martin Heidegger. In the 1930s, Sartre taught philosophy at a lycée. He also spent a year studying in Berlin, where he delved into phenomenology. These influences brewed in Sartre as he began formulating his own philosophy.

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Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria. His background was humble: his father was an agricultural worker who died in World War I when Camus was a baby, and his illiterate mother of Spanish origin raised him in a poor neighborhood of Algiers. Despite hardship (they lived in a two-room apartment; Camus later said he never forgot the silent suffering of his mother, which informed his outlook on human resilience), Camus excelled in school. He was a bright, athletic young man – passionate about football (soccer) and the outdoors of the Mediterranean.

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