Abstract

Volume XVIII of the distinguished "Religious Perspectives" series, this translation of Jaspers' 1962 publication Der philosophische Glaube ansichts [[sic]] der Offenbarung is an important addition to the library of English translations of Jaspers' works. It is a lengthy work and, as is typical of Jaspers, is heavily punctuated with textual divisions and subdivisions--a procedure so exaggerated in Jaspers that it is quite distracting. The translation of E. B. Ashton, who has since translated Jaspers' three-volume major work Philosophie, is extremely good, just as one would expect. Jaspers holds that there is an underlying metaphysical structure in being--the Encompassing--which eludes any final conceptual formulation. It can only be approached through "ciphers," symbols which obliquely intimate the nature of the ultimate, and which it belongs to the philosopher to read. While on the one hand Jaspers quarrels with the various religious faiths because of their tendency to take their own ciphers as final and definitive, he is on the other hand profoundly interested in the historical faiths inasmuch as they represent important and deep expressions of faith in the transcendent. In this book Jaspers seeks a rapprochement between "philosophical faith"--an idea which he has ultimately borrowed from Kant's notion of rational faith in the speculatively unknowable thing-in-itself--and the faith that is based on revelation.--J. D. C.