It looks like you're offline.
Open Library logo
additional options menu
November 4, 2021 | History

Karl Jaspers

23 February 1883 - 26 February 1969

"Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) began his academic career working as a psychiatrist and, after a period of transition, he converted to philosophy in the early 1920s. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century he exercised considerable influence on a number of areas of philosophical inquiry: especially on epistemology, the philosophy of religion, and political theory. His philosophy has its foundation in a subjective-experiential transformation of Kantian philosophy, which reconstructs Kantian transcendentalism as a doctrine of particular experience and spontaneous freedom, and emphasizes the constitutive importance of lived existence for authentic knowledge. Jaspers obtained his widest influence, not through his philosophy, but through his writings on governmental conditions in Germany, and after the collapse of National Socialist regime he emerged as a powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education and reorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Despite his importance in the evolution of both philosophy and political theory in twentieth-century Germany, today Jaspers is a neglected thinker. He did not found a particular philosophical school, he did not attract a cohort of apostles, and, outside Germany at least, his works are not often the subject of high philosophical discussion. This is partly the result of the fact that the philosophers who now enjoy undisputed dominance in modern German philosophical history, especially Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote disparagingly about Jaspers, and they were often unwilling to take his work entirely seriously. To a perhaps still greater extent, however, his relative marginality is due to the fact that he is associated with the more prosaic periods of German political life, and his name is tarred with an aura of staid bourgeois common sense. Nonetheless, Jaspers' work set the parameters for a number of different philosophical debates, the consequences of which remain deeply influential in contemporary philosophy, and in recent years there have been signs that a more favourable reconstructive approach to his work is beginning to prevail."

—Quoted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

312 works Add another?

Sorting by Sorted by: Most Editions | First Published | Most Recent | Top Rated | Reading Log | Random

Showing all works by author. Would you like to see only ebooks?

  • Cover of: Nietzsche: an introduction to the understanding of his philosophical activity

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: The great philosophers.
    First published in 1955 14 editions in 3 languages — 3 previewable Cover of edition anaximanderherac0000jasp Cover of edition plato0000jasp

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: The origin and goal of history.
    First published in 1949 14 editions in 2 languages — 3 previewable Cover of edition origingoalofhist0000jasp Cover of edition origingoalhistor00jasp

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Way to wisdom: an introduction to philosophy

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Man in the modern age.
    First published in 1933 12 editions in 1 language — 2 previewable Cover of edition maninmodernage0000jasp

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures (Marquette Studies in Philosophy, No 11)

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Tragedy is not enough
    First published in 1947 9 editions in 2 languages — 2 previewable Cover of edition tragedyisnotenou00jasprich

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Reason and anti-reason in our time.
    First published in 1952 9 editions in 1 language — 1 previewable

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: The question of German guilt
    First published in 1947 8 editions in 1 language — 2 previewable Cover of edition questiongermangu00jasp

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Psychologie der Weltanschauungen.

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Myth and Christianity: an inquiry into the possibility of religion without myth

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: The perennial scope of philosophy.
    First published in 1949 6 editions in 1 language — 1 previewable

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: The idea of the university.
    First published in 1959 6 editions in 2 languages — 1 previewable

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Allgemeine Psychopathologie

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: The future of mankind.
    First published in 1958 6 editions in 1 language — 1 previewable

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Die grossen Philosophen.

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Kant: From The Great Philosophers, Volume 1
    First published in 1962 6 editions in 2 languages — 1 previewable

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Die geistige situation der zeit

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: politisches Bewusstsein in unserer Zeit.

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today
  • Cover of: Philosophy is for everyman: a short course in philosophical thinking.

    My Reading Lists:

    Create a new list

    Check-In

    ×Close
    Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
    Today

ID Numbers

Links (outside Open Library)

Alternative names

History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
November 4, 2021 Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten date of birth, links
September 30, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot add ISNI
April 21, 2020 Edited by JeffKaplan merge authors
March 31, 2017 Edited by MARC Bot add VIAF and wikidata ID
April 1, 2008 Created by an anonymous user initial import