Origin and Goal of History

<p>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.</p><p>Published in 1949 the year in which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded <i>The Origin and Goal of History</i> 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.</p><p>At a deeper level <i>The Origin and Goal of History</i> 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. </p><p>This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Christopher Thornhill.</p>