Origin and Goal of History

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German-born psychiatrist and philosopher and one of the most original, interesting and yet neglected European thinkers of the twentieth century. Initially trained as a psychiatrist before taking up philosophy, his book General Psychopathology (1913) remains a classic in psychiatric literature. Never an adherent of any school or movement, his philosophy was shaped by his early encounters with Max Weber, whose family were close friends of Jaspers', and later Martin Heidegger, who had an important influence on Jaspers' own brand of existentialism. Jaspers' thought was also deeply marked by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. As his wife was Jewish, he was dismissed from his chair as a professor at the University of Heidelberg in 1937 and his publications banned. At this time he was a tutor to Hannah Arendt, before she emigrated to the United States, and their ongoing philosophical exchanges after 1945 became a key feature of Jaspers' later work. Amongst his best-known works is The Question of German Guilt (1946), which examined the culpability of Germany as a whole in the atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich.

• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Christopher Thornhill Part 1: World History 1. The Axial Period 2. Schema of World History 3. Prehistory 4. The Ancient Historical Civilisations 5. The Axial Period and its Consequences 6. The Specific Quality of the West 7. Orient and Occident: The Eastern and the Western World 8. Once More: A Schema of History Part 2: Present and Future 9. The Intrinsically New: Science and Technology 10. The Present Situation of the World 11. The Future Part 3: The Meaning of History 12. Boundaries of History 13. Basic Structures of History 14. The Unity of History 15. Our Modern Historical Consciousness 16. Overcoming History. Index

"Jaspers has left us a rich and wide-ranging intellectual legacy encompassing psychiatry, intellectual history, and politics as well as philosophy." - Guy Bennett-Hunter, Times Literary Supplement