The Human Condition

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.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the most famous student of Plato, though he later distanced himself from some of his teacher’s ideas and founded his own school of philosophy, the Lyceum. Like Plato, he wrote on a number of philosophical topics, though his work is preserved as what appear to be lecture notes designed for classroom instruction. With Plato, Aristotle exerted an unparalleled influence on the intellectual traditions of Christian and Islamic thought into the Middle Ages.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was an Italian polymath whose contributions to astronomy, physics and engineering helped to establish the Scientific Revolution of the early modern era. In The Human Condition Arendt focuses on his invention of the telescope as a defining change in the history of science and the general intellectual culture of the modern age.

Rene Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher and mathematician. An important figure in the history of science, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) is widely considered the foundational text of modern Western philosophy. He is perhaps best known for the phrase cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”), a concept that Arendt uses to describe the rise of introspective philosophical analysis following the innovations of Galileo.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is the chief founder of the philosophical doctrine and political movement called communism. Born in the German city of Trier, Marx studied philosophy and law at the universities of Bonn and Berlin before converting to communism and embarking upon a long life of historical, political and economic work. In addition to the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx is best known for his unfinished study of the capitalist economy, the first part of which was published in his lifetime as Capital, Volume One (1867). Arendt positions her concepts of labor and work in contradistinction to the thought of Marx.