Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) was one of the most important German-speaking philosophers of the 20th century. With a doctorate in medicine and a habilitation in psychology, he was a full professor of philosophy in Heidelberg until his dismissal by the Nazi regime in 1937. In 1948, Jaspers accepted an academic call to the University of Basel, where he taught until his retirement in 1961.
‘Truth is what unites us‘ is one of Jaspers’ key sentences, whose thinking – following the humanist tradition of the great philosophers – is dedicated to the attempt to find orientation in a world that has become questionable and prone to ideology. As a metaphysician, Jaspers was also a co-founder of existential philosophy – and a prominent critic of post-war German politics.
The Karl Jaspers Complete Edition (ger. Karl-Jaspers-Gesamtausgabe, abbr. KJG) presents his multi-layered œuvre as a whole for the first time. In three sections – Works, Estate, Letters – all of Jaspers’ latest published writings, relevant posthumous publications, and a selection of further, previously unpublished estate texts and correspondence are being printed. An additional focus of the editorial work, in co-operation with the Karl Jaspers Foundation in Basel, is the systematic indexing of the Jaspers estate held in the German Literature Archive.
The KJG is a joint project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities with a research centre in Heidelberg and the Lower Saxony Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen (external link) with a research centre in Oldenburg.
