Who is Karl Jaspers?

Jaspers played an important role in establishing the foundations of clinical psychiatry, and in his mature years, he was one of the major philosophers to lay the groundwork for the existential movement. After World War II, he attempted to develop a world philosophy which would promote human unity based on freedom and tolerance. In his clinical work, Jaspers was influenced by Edmund Husserl’s method of phenomenology—the direct observation and description of phenomena with the attempt not to depend upon causal theories. His first published book, Allgemeine Psychopathologie, was one of the first serious attempts to present a critical and systematic synthesis of the modern methods available in psychiatry, making Jaspers one of the best known of the psychiatrists of Germany. In spite of this success, Jaspers’ interests were moving in the direction of general philosophy; the same year that he published his book he was able to enter the philosophical faculty as the specialist in empirical psychology at Heidelberg. By 1921, he was a full professor of philosophy, and in 1922 he occupied the second chair of that field.

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