31 Facts About Karl Jaspers

Karl Jaspers was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept the label.

Karl Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883 to a mother from a local farming community, and a jurist father.

Karl Jaspers showed an early interest in philosophy, but his father's experience with the legal system influenced his decision to study law at Heidelberg University.

Karl Jaspers first studied law in Heidelberg and later in Munich for three semesters.

Karl Jaspers became dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness and gave himself the task of improving the psychiatric approach.

In 1913 Karl Jaspers habilitated at the philosophical faculty of the Heidelberg University and gained there in 1914 a post as a psychology teacher.

The post later became a permanent philosophical one, and Karl Jaspers never returned to clinical practice.

In 1921, at the age of 38, Karl Jaspers turned from psychology to philosophy, expanding on themes he had developed in his psychiatric works.

Karl Jaspers became a well-known philosopher across Germany and Europe.

In 1948 Karl Jaspers moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Karl Jaspers remained prominent in the philosophical community and became a naturalized citizen of Switzerland living in Basel until his death on his wife's 90th birthday in 1969.

Karl Jaspers published a paper in 1910 in which he addressed the problem of whether paranoia was an aspect of personality or the result of biological changes.

Not unlike Freud, Karl Jaspers studied patients in detail, giving biographical information about the patients as well as notes on how the patients themselves felt about their symptoms.

Karl Jaspers set down his views on mental illness in a book which he published in 1913, General Psychopathology.

Karl Jaspers thought that psychiatrists could diagnose delusions in the same way.

Karl Jaspers argued that clinicians should not consider a belief delusional based on the content of the belief, but only based on the way in which a patient holds such a belief.

Karl Jaspers defined primary delusions as autochthonous, meaning that they arise without apparent cause, appearing incomprehensible in terms of a normal mental process.

Karl Jaspers considered primary delusions to be ultimately "un-understandable" since he believed no coherent reasoning process existed behind their formation.

In Philosophy, Karl Jaspers gave his view of the history of philosophy and introduced his major themes.

In making this leap, individuals confront their own limitless freedom, which Karl Jaspers calls Existenz, and can finally experience authentic existence.

Karl Jaspers took an active interest in Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, and developed the theory of an Axial Age, a period of substantial philosophical and religious development.

Karl Jaspers entered public debates with Rudolf Bultmann, wherein Karl Jaspers roundly criticized Bultmann's "demythologizing" of Christianity.

Karl Jaspers wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and modern economic and political institutions.

In that work, Karl Jaspers defines metaphysical guilt as each German's citizen's innate responsibility for the acts of Nazi Germany, contrasting this idea of metaphysical guilt with the concepts of legal, political, and moral guilt.

Karl Jaspers identified with the liberal political philosophy of Max Weber, although he rejected Weber's nationalism.

Karl Jaspers valued humanism and cosmopolitanism and, influenced by Immanuel Kant, advocated an international federation of states with shared constitutions, laws, and international courts.

Karl Jaspers strongly opposed totalitarian despotism and warned about the increasing tendency towards technocracy, or a regime that regards humans as mere instruments of science or of ideological goals.

Karl Jaspers held Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to be two of the most important figures in post-Kantian philosophy.

For Kierkegaard, at least, Karl Jaspers felt that Kierkegaard's whole method of indirect communication precludes any attempts to properly expound his thought into any sort of systematic teaching.

Walter Kaufmann argues in From Shakespeare to Existentialism that, though Karl Jaspers was certainly indebted to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he was closest to Kant's philosophy:.

Karl Jaspers is too often seen as the heir of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to whom he is in many ways less close than to Kant.