Karl Jaspers

Karl Jaspers was one of the founding figures of existential philosophy — a physician and psychiatrist who turned to philosophy to articulate what clinical science could not capture about the human condition. His three-volume Philosophy argued that existence exceeds every attempt to comprehend it in objective terms, and that the genuinely human is encountered in the "boundary situations" of suffering, death, struggle, and guilt.

Jaspers developed the concept of the "Axial Age" — his thesis that the sixth century BCE saw a simultaneous breakthrough in spiritual and philosophical consciousness across Greece, India, China, and Israel. His concept of "Existenz" — the authentic self that cannot be made into an object — influenced both Heidegger and the French existentialists. His public insistence on German collective guilt after the Second World War made him an important moral voice beyond academic philosophy.