Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher
and one of the most original European thinkers of the twentieth
century. As a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, he had a
strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. He
was Hannah Arendt's supervisor before her emigration to the United
States in the 1930s and himself experienced the consequences of
Nazi persecution. He was removed from his position at the
University of Heidelberg in 1937, due to his wife being Jewish.
Published in 1949, the year in which the Federal Republic of
Germany was founded, The Origin and Goal of History is a vitally
important book. It is renowned for Jaspers' theory of an 'Axial
Age', running from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. Jaspers argues
that this period witnessed a remarkable flowering of new ways of
thinking that appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman
world, in striking parallel development but without any obvious
direct cultural contact between them. Jaspers identifies key
thinkers from this age, including Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra,
Homer and Plato, who had a profound influence on the trajectory of
future philosophies and religions. For Jaspers, crucially, it is
here that we see the flowering of diverse philosophical beliefs
such as scepticism, materialism, sophism, nihilism, and debates
about good and evil, which taken together demonstrate human beings'
shared ability to engage with universal, humanistic questions as
opposed to those mired in nationality or authoritarianism. At a
deeper level, The Origin and Goal of History provides a crucial
philosophical framework for the liberal renewal of German
intellectual life after 1945, and indeed of European intellectual
life more widely, as a shattered continent attempted to find
answers to what had happened in the preceding years. This Routledge
Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Christopher Thornhill.
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