 Jaspers left unfinished Die Großen Philosophen, whose declared aim was “promoting the happiness that comes of meeting great men and sharing in their thoughts”, and employed his personal method of constant questioning and struggle. This is a monumental project of universal history of philosophy, whose creators were the outstanding philosophers who inspired the human thought. Jaspers, who believed that only through communication with others can we come to ourselves and to wisdom, regarded the philosophers he discusses in this book as his “eternal contemporaries” and “the disturbers” in the sense of thinkers for whom doubt and despair loomed large. The first two volumes of this work appeared in 1958, while the third and fourth have been gathered from the vast material of his posthumous papers. The editors Ermarth and Ehrlich have, however, been able to stitch together a coherent book that, in accordance with Jaspers’s plan, primarily covers the philosophers whom he termed “the disturbers”: thinkers for whom doubt and despair loomed large. The English translations were by Ralf Manheim and edited by Hannah Arendt, and appeared in parts until 1994.