Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born in Hanover, Germany to liberal Jewish parents but raised in the eastern German city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). She studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger and later at Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers, where she completed her dissertation on St. Augustine. After fleeing Europe in 1941 due to the rise of the Nazis, she settled in New York City. The Origins of Totalitarianism, a study of Nazism and Stalinism, was published in 1951 and established her fame. Besides The Human Condition (1958), she is also known for her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963). Arendt died in 1975, leaving the sequel to The Human Condition, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.

Plato (428/7 or 424/3 to BCE–348/7 BCE) is the author of some of the central works of Western philosophy, perhaps most notably The Republic. A student of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), most of Plato’s writings consist of dialogues between his teacher and various interlocutors on a variety of philosophical topics. Plato founded the first institution of higher education in the West, the Academy, where his students included Aristotle. Plato’s defining philosophical contribution is his doctrine of the Forms: the notion that eternal ideas accessible only to thought provide the ultimate explanation of both the material world and abstract concepts like beauty, justice and the good.