PRESENTATION-COPY

JASPERS, KARL.

Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte.

München, Piper & Co., (1950). 8vo. Original orange full cloth with gilt lettering. Original dust-jacket. Dust-jacket with some tears to extremities and lacking ab. 2 cm. at lower capital. Internally very nice and clean. With the bookplate of the famous American educator Paul Arthur Schilpp. 349, (1), (1, -advertisement) pp.

Inscribed by the author to front free end-paper: "Für Paul Schilpp/ Herzlich/ Karl Jaspers".

First edition, later issue (8th.-11th. thousand), presentation-copy for Paul Schilpp, of one of Jaspers' most important works within political philosophy.

The German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Theodor Jaspers (1883-1969) was one of the main exponents of existentialism in Germany and he had an enormous impact on theology, psychiatry and philosophy of his time. Later on, his works in political philosophy came to exersize an even greater influence upon 20th century thought.

"Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969) began his academic career working as a psychiatrist and, after a period of transition, he converted to philosophy in the early 1920s. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century he exercised considerable influence on a number of areas of philosophical inquiry: especially on epistemology, the philosophy of religion, and political theory. His philosophy has its foundation in a subjective-experiential transformation of Kantian philosophy, which reconstructs Kantian transcendentalism as a doctrine of particular experience and spontaneous freedom, and emphasizes the constitutive importance of lived existence for authentic knowledge. Jaspers obtained his widest influence, not through his philosophy, but through his writings on governmental conditions in Germany, and after the collapse of National Socialist regime he emerged as a powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education and reorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany." (SEP).

Order-nr.: 49007