Abstract

From the translator of The Future of Mankind and The Future of Germany comes this most welcome English rendering of the first volume of Jasper's Philosophie, considered by many his main work. Of all the great figures of the existential-phenomenological movement--Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel--Jaspers has been the most neglected in the Anglo-American world. Jaspers alone among these figures has a work as important as his Philosophie still untranslated into English. This work, which consists of three volumes, was originally published in 1932. The present edition contains: a 1955 Epilogue by Jaspers who comments on the intent of the book and the criticism it received; an "Introduction to Philosophy" which prefaces the body of Philosophy; and then the main body of this title: "Book One: Philosophical World Orientation." Here Jaspers carves out the proper structure of philosophy--not as a science which must compete with other sciences but as thinking concerned with man's place in the world and which regulates the role that science plays in man's world. There is, unfortunately, no index nor any glossary of German-English and English-German.--J. D. C.