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November 4, 2021 | History

Karl Jaspers

"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.

German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher (1883–1969)

Born 23 February 1883
Died 26 February 1969

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

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  • Cover of: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-tzu, Nagarjuna

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  • Cover of: The origin and goal of history.

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  • Cover of: Way to wisdom: an introduction to philosophy

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  • Cover of: Man in the modern age.
    Cover of edition maninmodernage0000jasp First published in 1933 12 editions

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  • Cover of: Reason and Existenz: five lectures

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  • Cover of: Tragedy is not enough
    Cover of edition tragedyisnotenou00jasprich First published in 1947 9 editions

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  • Cover of: Reason and anti-reason in our time.

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  • Cover of: The question of German guilt
    Cover of edition questiongermangu00jasp First published in 1947 8 editions

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  • Cover of: Myth and Christianity: an inquiry into the possibility of religion without myth

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  • Cover of: Psychologie der Weltanschauungen.

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  • Cover of: Kant: From The Great Philosophers, Volume 1

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  • Cover of: Allgemeine Psychopathologie
    First published in 1923 6 editions

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  • Cover of: Die geistige situation der zeit

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  • Cover of: The future of mankind.
    First published in 1958 6 editions

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  • Cover of: The perennial scope of philosophy.

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  • Cover of: The idea of the university.
    First published in 1959 6 editions

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  • Cover of: Die grossen Philosophen
    First published in 1957 6 editions

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  • Cover of: Strindberg und van Gogh: Versuch einer pathographischen Analyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hölderlin

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  • Cover of: Philosophy and the world: selected essays and lectures

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German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher (1883–1969)

Born 23 February 1883
Died 26 February 1969

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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