Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World by Stephen Trombley

Author:Stephen Trombley [Trombley, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782390381
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Jaspers’s ‘pre-philosophical’ period

Jaspers studied law, then took PhDs in both medicine and psychology at Heidelberg, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. His early influences were Kant, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. This philosophical bent caused Jaspers to question the prevailing method of psychiatric diagnosis; looking beyond diagnostic labels, he studied the biographies of patients. His method, then revolutionary, is now an everyday part of psychiatric practice. His two-volume work General Psychopathology (1913) became a standard text. In 1919 he published Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Psychology of Worldviews). This work remains untranslated in English, but its title gives a sense of how Jaspers’s thought had developed, and where it was heading, incorporating his reading of Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich von Schelling and adapting their hermeneutics for a new age. During this ‘pre-philosophical’ period Jaspers developed a strong belief in the importance of science. At the same time he also valued religion and faith (he was influenced by Kierkegaard’s concept of the ‘leap of faith’). However, Jaspers’ respect for both science and religion came with serious caveats: he did not believe in a personal God or in the objectivity of science. He was pre-eminently sceptical on the subject of certainty.

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