"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.
Karl Jaspers
×CloseGerman-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher (1883–1969)
Born | 23 February 1883 |
Died | 26 February 1969 |
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Karl Jaspers
×CloseGerman-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher (1883–1969)
Born | 23 February 1883 |
Died | 26 February 1969 |
Subjects
Philosophy, Philosophie, Philosophers, Christianity, History, Existentialism, Truth, Atomic bomb, Demythologization, Modern Philosophy, Psychiatry, World politics, Bibliography, Biography, Civilization, Démythologisation, Existenzphilosophie, Histoire, Introductions, Logic, Moral and religious aspects, Moral and religious aspects of Atomic bomb, Pathological Psychology, Philosophes, Political ethicsPeople
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Plato, Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884-1976), Augustine Saint, Bishop of Hippo, Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677), Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Jesus Christ, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Max Weber (1864-1920), Socrates, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)ID Numbers
- OLID: OL41476A
- ISNI: 0000000121266033
- VIAF: 31998030
- Wikidata: Q76509
- Inventaire.io: wd:Q76509
Links (outside Open Library)
Alternative names
- Karl-Jaspers-Symposion (1983 Oldenburg, Germany)
- Karl Jasper
- Colloque Karl Jaspers (1986 Centre de recherches germaniques de l'Université de Nancy II)
- Internationaler Karl Jaspers-Kongress.
- Internationaler Karl Jaspers-Kongress (2002 Basel, Switzerland)
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 |