Jaspers

Enns reflects on the meaning of guilt and responsibility in the context of Indigenous struggles in Canada. While rarely uncomplicated, the question of who is to blame poses a unique challenge in the case of historical atrocities with enduring legacies. When those guilty of the original violations are long dead, yet leave behind institutions that perpetuate the conditions for oppression and privilege, it is tempting to assign collective guilt. With the help of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who argued in the aftermath of the second world war for a robust understanding of collective responsibility, distinct from individual guilt, Enns navigates the effects of oversimplifying these concepts. Central to her discussion is the dramatic shift in contemporary scholarly and public discourses on victimhood and identity—on victimhood as identity—since Arendt famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, no one is.” With reference to the parallel ways in which victimhood is assumed as a permanent state and granted moral authority in North American Indigenous and anti-Black racism struggles, Enns notes the limits of an identity-based politics, and argues for a richer understanding of collective responsibility—one that will create a future world with a better inheritance.

Oistros," or oestrus, or estrus, is a concept with many meanings and implications. In ancient Greece oestrus was a gadfly that stung animals and drove them to react. Socrates was the first to use the image allegorically in describing himself as a gadfly that awakens people from their lethargy and laziness. It is connected with the passion for life, with creativity, and an awakening from the indolence of everyday living. It is also directly associated with the female reproductive cycle via the estrogens related to pregnancy and childbirth. It is thus related to the ideas of attraction, union, and creation in general, as well as to spiritual, mental, and psychic elation, enthusiasm, and inspiration. "Zhi Mian" is a concept that the Chinese Institute for Existential Psychology introduced to the existential community a few years ago. It means to "face life directly" and to have the courage to look at our existential issues with no pretenses. This is similar to the concept of "oistros" evolved by "gignesthai," the Hellenic Association for Existential Psychology, that is, to the awareness and awakening that promote change and turn life into an intense and meaningful experience. When stung by death awareness, we give greater importance to life by realizing our time limitations and are not wasting time as if we were eternal. "Oistros" leads to a life full of passion, energy, and creativity, helping us to achieve the Epicurean dictum that "To live well and to die well is the same task."

"George Derfer, Zhihe Wang and Michel Weber (eds.), The Roar of Awakening. A Whiteheadian Dialogue Between Western Psychotherapies and Eastern Worldviews, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2009. (251 p. ; ISBN: 978-3-86838-039-2 ; 89 €)
The primary goal of this volume is to describe the contemporary state of affairs in Western psychotherapy, and to do so in a Whiteheadian spirit: with genuine openness to the relative ways in which creativity, beauty, truth and peace manifest themselves in various cultural traditions. To do so, it chooses to explore afresh a cross-elucidatory path that was born with the field of history of religion (and Religionwissenschaft): what have we, and can we, learn from a dialogue with Eastern worldviews? In order to generate meaningful contrasts between these different systems of thought, all the papers address the following core issues. On the one hand, how does the given system understand the interaction of individuality, society, and nature (or cosmos)? Especially: what is its standpoint with regard to the nature of consciousness and with regard to the mind/body problem?; how far is it dualistic?; how are destiny and historicity assessed? On the other hand, what is the paradigm of all mal-adjustment (or pathology) and what is its typical tuning-in (or curative) pattern? What are furthermore the ins and outs of the diagnostic and therapeutic assessments involved? Wherever possible, some (meta)theoretical and clinical issues are addressed from the vantage point of selected material from abnormal psychology or psychiatry.
Table of contents
Contents
Contributors
Foreword — George Derfer, Zhihe Wang and Michel Weber
Introduction — Michel Weber
I. The View from the East
1. Consciousness: The Vedantic Approach to Life and Reality, Francis-Vincent Anthony
2. Dual-Aspect Framework for Consciousness, RamLakhan Pandey Vimal
3. The Paradoxes of Radical Asceticism: Jainism as a Therapeutic Paradigm, Jeffery D. Long
4. Yoga Therapeutics: Philosophical, Scientific and Humanistic Approaches, Ashok Kumar Malhotra
5. Can Indian spiritual practices be used in psychotherapy?, R L Kapur
II. Transcultural Dialogue
6. Ineradicable Frustration and Liberation in Tiantai Buddhism, Brook Ziporyn
7. An Exploration and Analysis into Chinese Traditional Psychotherapy Ideas—A Concurrent Comment on the Integrative point of view of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy, Fengqiang Gao and Yingmin Chen
8. The Kyoto School and self-awareness in the field of the absolute nothingness —A comparison with Whitehead’s philosophy, Eiko Hanaoka
9. Jung and Hisamatsu Re-envisioning Religiosity: Jungian Psychotherapy and the Kyoto School, Tokiyuki Nobuhara
10. Reconstructing the Meaning of Being Human: A Postmodern Reinterpretation of Frankl in the Framework of Whitehead’s Philosophy, Yoshihiro Hayashi
11. The Development of Binswanger’s Daseinsanalysis, Shoji Muramoto
12. The Intercultural and Daseinsanalytical Psychiatry of Kimura Bin, Bernard Stevens
13. A Certain Form of Psychotherapy (Kenosis, Prajna, Jung, and Hillman), David T. Bradford
14. Vedanta, Process and Psychotherapy, Joseph Grange
15. On Zen Buddhism, Clive Sherlock
"

Het begrip schuld is meerzinnig en complex. In een economische setting heeft het een andere betekenis dan in een juridische setting en ook daar weer een andere dan in een morele, psychologische of religieuze setting. De auteur houdt zich in dit artikel vooral bezig met morele, existentiële schuld. Hij maakt onderscheid tussen debitum en culpa, individuele schuld en collectieve schuld, schuld hebben en schuldig zijn, lot en schuld.

Since the French Revolution, intellectual and popular cultures of the West have been characterized by tropes of “unmasking,” a kind of exposure that purports to show mendacity and domination operating unseen beneath the surface of human affairs. Karl Mannheim was a particularly astute commentator on this phenomenon. His Ideology and Utopia (1929) and cognate writings offer an account of unmasking that is detailed, contextual, nuanced and critical. While he grants that unmasking was a condition of sociology’s emergence, Mannheim argues that it has outlived its usefulness for purposes of explanatory understanding. He further decries the destructive impact of unmasking on political discourse: an openly debunking attitude poisons the well of principled dialogue by claiming one’s interlocutor to be either a charlatan or a dupe of history. Critics such as Hannah Arendt and her mentor Karl Jaspers went further, condemning unmasking as execrable in principle and depicting sociology and psychology as major casualties of its rhetorical excesses – Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge included. This article describes Mannheim’s analysis of unmasking, the rhetorical moves he employed to move beyond the unmasking mode, and objections to his project of Jaspers and Arendt. Mannheim’s reception is muted today while Arendt’s is on a steadily rising curve of appreciation. But a reconstruction of Mannheim’s ideas on unmasking reveals an author who, at the time Arendt sparred with him, demonstrated a far greater comprehension than she did of the history and stakes of a topos that pervades modern thinking.

Il ruolo della filosofia nel mondo contemporaneo: la lezione di Karl Jaspers 1 1. Nelle società odierne due sono le istanze veritative predominanti: le scienze naturali e le fedi rivelate. Per moltissimi individui le scienze naturali costituiscono la principale via d'accesso alla verità, in quanto non solo sono in grado di comprendere e interpretare la realtà senza far riferimento ad istanze metafisiche o religiose, ma sembrano poter altresì dare indicazioni precise, certe e fondate per risolvere i grandi problemi dell'esistenza. Esse producono infatti conoscenze che valgono dappertutto allo stesso modo, tanto che le tecniche sviluppate sulla loro scorta sono utilizzate da popolazioni appartenenti a culture anche profondamente differenti tra loro. La capacità che le scienze naturali hanno di darci un'interpretazione universalmente condivisa della realtà, insieme alla supposizione-presunzione che esse possano in futuro non solo risolvere gli enigmi conoscitivi ancora aperti, ma consentire altresì la costruzione di strumenti tecnologici capaci di migliorare sempre più la vita dell'umanità, genera tuttavia una diffusa fede acritica nella scienza, che si accompagna spesso a manifestazioni di agnosticismo religioso, se non di esplicito ateismo.

Modern psychiatry, as represented by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), and phenomenology, as developed by Edmund Husserl, began around the same time, namely, during the last decades of the 19th century. Moreover, psychiatry and phenomenology have always shared a common goal: they have both sought detailed descriptions of human experience. This communality of goals has repeatedly led psychiatrists to turn to phenomenology for aid in explicating mental life. For many psychiatrists it has seemed that phenomenology offered a method that could help them better understand and conceptualize the experiences of their patients. As a result, psychiatrists have utilized various phenomenological approaches just as phenomenologists have explored subjects in psychiatry.

The history of this relationship has remained ambiguous, however. Frequently a gap has yawned between the broad theoretical perspectives adapted from phenomenology and the needs of clinical practice. Furthermore, psychiatrists-who are often trained in the biological and natural sciences-may feel disinclined to delve deeply into explorations of the subjective when these explorations appear to them to remain too abstract or metaphysical. And, returning the compliment, phenomenologists have usually exhibited a profound reluctance to ascribe centrality to biological and naturalistic perspectives. In the post-World War II years, impressive progress in empirical research has provided physicians with powerful means for diagnosis and treatment, for example, with psychopharmacology; because psychiatrists are always pragmatists at heart, these new insights have tended to supplant phenomenological insights.

More recently, the relationship has grown more complicated, and these complexities offer hope of a revitalized cross-fertilization between psychiatry and phenomenology. On the one hand, empirical research in psychiatry continues at an even more rapid pace. On the other hand, many physicians and patients are more aware of the gaps, inadequacies, and even untoward consequences of the one-sidedness of these new developments. This has spurred a turn towards holistic medicine, wellness, and environmental medicine that is more congenial to phenomenological views. Moreover, there is a growing recognition that phenomenological and neurobiological perspectives can no longer oppose one another; when properly conceived, each will strengthen the other. We shall first sketch a brief history of the relationships between phenomenology and psychiatry. Subsequently, we shall delineate possible directions that future inquiry might take.

Over the years, critics have noticed two antithetical tendencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s work: one toward existentialism and another toward determinism. These two labels recur frequently in Vonnegut criticism with little or no explanation as to how they apply to his novels. In spite of the critical insistence on Vonnegut’s existential or deterministic philosophy, little work has been done to develop either of these ideas, and strictly through critical repetition, Vonnegut’s work has become more closely associated with French existentialism than with the determinism of American literary naturalism.

By overstating the influence of existentialism on Vonnegut’s novels, critics have neglected the influence of determinism on his work, and this neglect disconnects the author from his American literature roots of naturalism. Through an examination of Vonnegut’s treatment of free will and determinism in three of his signature texts, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this study reveals a tension between the two
philosophies in the author’s work. Instead of being predominantly existential, Vonnegut’s works leave unresolved a tension between existentialism, where people create their own meaning through acts of free will, and determinism, where people have no free will and react to the physical environments in which they have been placed.

This work will examine the concept of authority, taking Hannah Arendt‘s political thinking as a cue. My aim is to rethink and vindicate the importance of this political category, which has been insufficiently examined by the tradition of political thought. In my opinion, its specific dimension needs to be further studied so that we can better understand the current political crisis. In order to fulfil this new approach, we need to dissociate or disentangle the notion of authority from those of power and authoritarianism, concepts with which it has usually been confused. In this regard, this work highlights the fact that authority is incompatible with a conception of power that is embodied in the notion of sovereignty. Contrary to this conception, authority implies a form of obedience which does not stand on imposition, coercion or violence, but on other factors, such as recognition, and consequently it is inevitably defined by its fragile character. Implicitly, authority reveals the incompleteness of power and thus discloses that power needs an exterior instance as a source of legitimacy.
In order to complete this task, this research rests upon a deep and exhaustive examination of the works of Hannah Arendt from the perspective of authority and argues that this concept does not play a secondary or isolated role in her thinking. Authority is linked with one of the central problems for this thinker, that of the question of the world. Furthermore, authority is located at the very heart of other major issues, such as the concepts of power, violence, sovereignty, law, foundation, memory, revolution, judgment, common sense or, above all, the world. At the same time the concept of authority plays an important role in the understanding of Arendt‘s position in regard to the council system and it is useful to delve more deeply into other phenomena such as totalitarianism, civil disobedience, forgiveness, promise or both the activities of work and action.
In Arendt, authority is defined by characteristics such as its relational dimension and its dynamic character. In addition, authority is seen as a kind of resource which can counterbalance the unpredictable character inherent to action that at the same time does not negate its freedom or its spontaneity. On the other hand, authority provides a horizon of permanence that is not present in the Arendtian category of power and is crucial for the possibility or viability of the political foundation. As a result of this consideration, in the following pages I develop what I call a ―power of reception‖ and I will reconsider the concept of the author on the basis of Arendt‘s reflections. Finally, this work aims to tackle what the thinker considered as one of the major challenges for the current political thinking: the reconciliation of not freedom and equality but of equality and authority.

In most discourse on arts, modernism and avant-garde are regarded as deeply intertwined phenomena or even synonyms. Within film criticism and research, however, they are thoroughly separated. In this paper a selection of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from 1955–1967 will be examined as outstanding examples of non-avant-garde modernism. I attempt to elucidate how the films are used to examine a struggle between word and image. The conceptual framework behind the term image is taken from Henri Bergson’s understanding of all material as image, whereas Vilém Flusser provides the insight into the history of the struggle between the linear logic of the word and the ‘magical’ logic of the image. Gilles Deleuze’ analysis of the appearance of thought in cinema will be employed to cast further light on the methods involved in Godard’s work. The films and their underlying intention are shown as related to Fredric Jamesons’s understanding of the concept modernity. Finally it will be claimed that Alain Badiou’s concepts of Truth, Event and subject are founded on an understanding related to Jameson, but that through dehistoricizing modernity they found modernism as an attitude that may be taken up as a guiding principle. In terms of ethics modernism in this sense lies close to the realm of virtue: the virtue of thought as rebellion. Through a thorough examination of chosen aspects in Godard’s work they are exhibited as examples of the potential outcome of such an attitude. Finally it will be claimed that cinema is not a form of art, whereas modernist cinema of which Godard provides some of the clearest examples, is a medium and venue for thought: that the cinematic apparatus is in his hands research equipment, employed to investigate what it means to be an incorporated subject in a material world. Such research provides friction and slows down philosophical mansplaining. This project, revealed by looking not merely at a single film but Godard’s continuus work as a process of thought, remains and, according to Badiou’s understanding of Truth, will remain unconcluded. The underlying attitude thus remains valid.

"In his phenomenological study of imaginative acts in The Imaginary, Jean-Paul Sartre declares that memory and imagination are two different functions, and consequently severs the two from one another. Imagination, he argues, is the epitome of human freedom, since it allows consciousness to detach itself from experience or to negate reality; recollection, on the other hand, entirely depends on perception and is portrayed in The Imaginary as reproduction of perceptual experience. I show in this paper that although he explicitly treats memory and imagination as dichotomous, Sartre’s description of the two indicates strong affinities between them. First, Sartre uses recollections as examples of imaginative acts. Second, his phenomenological description of imagination is wholly applicable to recollection. The paper re-examines the relationship between memory and imagination in The Imaginary and uses Sartre’s theory of imagination as well as his autobiographical writing to conceptualize autobiographical memory as an active and productive aspect of the human mind "

The data from recent excavations in the Oman peninsula, especially in the Ja’alan and the Jebel Qara (Sultanate of
Oman) enable us better to refine certain cultural entities and to define new ones, to help determine the chronology of a part of the late prehistory of south-eastern Arabia. To begin with, the “empty quarter of the early Holocene” is half
full: “Fasad facies” characterizes one of the earliest Holocene hunter-gatherers occupation in Oman (8000–7500 BC).
Today we possess data from several stratified sites, enabling definition of two quite distinct Neolithic techno-facies,
which appear in succession: the trihedral points facies between 6500 and 4500 BC, and the facies of  the points with diamond-shaped section between 4500 and about 3800–3700 BC.

Ce livre développe, à partir de Merleau-Ponty, Henry et Sartre, une phénoménologie décrivant la vie perceptive du point de vue du désir d'éprouver qui s'y déploie. L'auteur interroge, selon différents chemins tout à la fois opposés et noués les uns aux autres, le rapport de la vie perceptive à l'imaginaire et à la théâtralité originaire du corps. Il montre comment chaque expérience perceptive est la mise en jeu d'un désir de vivre, comment elle est susceptible d'accroître ou d'affaiblir la capacité des individus à se laisser affecter en profondeur par leur situation, à l'endurer, à y ouvrir du possible.

Contenu : Maurice Merleau-Ponty : La perception comme toucher à distance - La texture imaginaire du réel - Violence et événementialité de la vision - La théâtralité originaire du corps - Michel Henry : La vulnérabilité intrinsèque du pâtir - Affectivité, sensibilité, temporalité - Vie et possibilité - Impression et réalité - La texture imaginaire des impressions - Jean-Paul Sartre : Immanence, affectivité et intentionnalité - L'imaginaire et le retard originaire de la conscience - Émotion et imagination - Liberté et théâtralité.

This essay analyzes Karl Jaspers’s view of melancholia and schizophrenia developed in General Psychopathology, further explored in the comparative psychiatric study Strindberg and van Gogh—Swedenborg-Holderlin (1922) and expanded in the Groningen Lectures on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche collected in Reason and Existence (1935). The analysis, undergone in order to define the role and significance of the condition of human existence within Jaspers’s philosophical thought expounded in his magnum opus Philosophy (1932), involves a discussion of his pluralistic clinical approach to the psychopathology of melancholy and schizophrenia as well as his own existential interpretation of the morbid psyche.

Karl Jaspers ist aufgrund der in den letzten Jahren erschienen Arbeiten und Quelleneditionen heute schon sehr gut erforscht-und entsprechende Arbei-ten schreiten auch weiter gut voran. 1 1 Leben als Grenzsituation : eine Biographie in Briefen / Karl Jaspers. Hrsg. von Matthias Bormuth.-Göttingen : Wallstein-Verlag, 2019.-318 S. ; 21 cm.-ISBN 978-3-8353-3430-4 : EUR 19.90 [#6632].-Rez.: IFB 19-3 http://informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=9944-Karl Jaspers : Arzt, Psychologe, Phi-losoph, politischer Denker / Kurt Salamun.-Berlin ; [Heidelberg] : Metzler, 2019.-X, 157 S. ; 24 cm.-ISBN 978-3-476-04997-1 : EUR 29.99 [#6818].-Rez.: IFB 20-1 http://www.informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=10189-Karl Jaspers und die Massenmedien : der politische Philosoph im Widerstreit der Öffentlichkeit / Jürgen Wilke.-Bremen : Edition Lumière, 2018.-153 S. : Ill. ; 22 cm.-(Presse und Geschichte-neue Beiträge ; 113).-ISBN 978-3-943245-81-3 : EUR 24.80 [#5783].-Rez.: IFB 18-1 http://informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=8920-Existentielle Freiheit und politische Freiheit : die Freiheitsideen von Karl Jaspers und Friedrich August Hayek im Ver-gleich / Philipp Batthyány.-Berlin : Duncker & Humblot, 2019.-436 S. : Dia-gramme ; 24 cm.-(Philosophische Schriften ; 98).-ISBN 978-3-428-15744-0 : EUR 69.90 [#6728].-Eine Rezension in IFB ist vorgesehen.

From the Malleus Maleficarum to DSM-III, the Rat Man to Son of Sam, shaman to psychopharmacologist, Hippocrates to France, and King David to Senator Eagleton, concepts of mental disorder have fascinated us. It therefore seems surprising that there has never been an extended monograph on the conceptual groundwork of psychiatric nosology. This book is designed to explore some of the philosophical assumptions, trade-offs, compromises, omissions, commissions, possibilities, impossibilities, successes and failures of contemporary psychiatric classification. As an exploration it cannot claim to be a comprehensive review of psychiatric taxonomies or an exhaustive critique of them. We hope that it will accomplish a few modest functions, including bringing some shock of the new. In the Forward, Allen Frances warns of the danger of reifying diagnostic concepts - treating mental disorders as concrete things rather than useful abstractions or constructs. Instead of reifying classification, we intend this book to expand the conceptual scope of it - to be a long essay on the many possibilities of psychiatric classification. Indeed, we conceive an important task of good science to be the uncovering and elaboration of alternative ways of making sense of things, including scientific things themselves.

Karl Jaspers' phenomenology remains important today, not solely because of its continuing influence in some areas of psychiatry, but because, if fully understood, it can provide a method and set of concepts for making new progress in the science of psychopathology. In order to understand this method and set of concepts, it helps to recognize the significant influence that Edmund Husserl's early work, Logical investigations, exercised on Jaspers' formulation of them. We trace the Husserlian influence while clarifying the main components of Jaspers' method. Jaspers adopted Husserl's notions of intuition, description, and presuppositionlessness, transforming them when necessary in order to serve the investigations of the psychopathologist. Jaspers also took over from Wilhelm Dilthey and others the tools of understanding (Verstehen) and self-transposal. The Diltheyian procedures were integrated into the Husserlian ones to produce a method that enables psychiatrists to define the basic kinds of psychopathological mental states.

This article offers alternate readings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1963) to those proposed in a preceding article by Esma Kartal. It argues against the contention that the two films express optimism about one’s ability to resolve spiritual-existential angst and the possibility of ultimately reaffirming one’s faith. Through close analysis of pivotal scenes, including that of Death in the Castle in The Seventh Seal and the Frostnäs church service in Winter Light, the article exposes the unremitting pessimism that pervades the films’ atmospheres. In essence, the article asserts that the two films, Winter Light in particular, are among the most pessimistic in Bergman’s cinema.

The First World War was both an historical and a philosophical event. Philosophers engaged in what Kurt Flasch aptly called "the spiritual mobilization" of philosophy. Max Scheler was particularly important among these "war philosophers", given that he was the one who penned some of the most influential philosophical writings of the First World War, among them Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg. As I aim to show, Max Scheler's war writings were crucial for Jan Patočka's interpretation of the First World War in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. However, the importance of Scheler's war writings goes far beyond the First World War for Patočka, since they offer Patočka a far-reaching interpretation of the 'excessive' character of the 20th century. As I will show through the example of Max Scheler, the German war philosophers succumbed to a dangerously romantic con- ception of "force" – and it is this ominous force, which Patočka takes to lie at the root of the increas- ingly excessive character of the 20th and 21st centuries.

“Throughout human history, perhaps even pre-human, there has been a tension between the need for order and the forces that cause change. That tension is greater now than ever, because, in our increasingly globalized world, the rate of change is also increasing. This book finally explains how we can cope: we have stories. We live our narratives.” Brian Spooner, University of Pennsylvania, is editor of Globalization: The Crucial Phase and Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order

"The idea that Axial Ages occurred, and that they provide warnings/opportunities for us today, seems both new and useful. But the value of this book is additional to this stance, in that it looks at cultural change - civilizations - from a complexity viewpoint. These changes are certainly complicated, but the pressures are interwoven and therefore need to be understood as complex. The book does a good job of explaining our present cultural difficulties - our prospective emergencies social, ecological and physical - in a wholly new way. Perhaps we'll get new answers..." Jack Cohen, evolutionary biologist, is co-author of The Collapse of Chaos, with Ian Steward.

"This is a challenging and creative tour de force on comparative, global, world history and cross-cultural, complex societal dynamics. Without doubt one of the most stimulating works in the tradition of big history and macro analysis.” Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, George Mason University, is author of Power Laws in the Social Sciences: Discovering Non-equilibrium Dynamics in the Social Universe.

“In this book, Dmitri Bondarenko (Russia) and Ken Baskin (USA) compare Modernity with the period historians know as the Axial Age (800-200 BCE) as times of transformation, responding to rapidly increasing social complexity. In doing so, they try to apply the experience of the earlier period, and the time of cultural achievement that followed it, to our time of ideological tension among civilizations. The great achievement of this relatively small book is the lucid way in which the co-authors present a picture of complex worldwide developments, based upon their mastery of recent and older literature, and their efforts to point to a way out of the hopelessly divided socio-political situation of today.” Henri J.M. Claessen, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University, is author of Structural Change; Evolution and Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology.

“With a lens of great magnification, the authors search through the intricacies of history, selecting its most important threads to weave together. What emerges is a rich tapestry in which the underlying trajectory of history, not clearly visible to the untutored eye, is brought boldly to the surface. And far from being couched in academic jargon—as one might have supposed—the book is a rare combination of brilliant analysis and beautifully crafted prose. Moreover, it ends on a hopeful note with the authors prescribing what they think societies must do if they are to confront and surmount the challenges that lie ahead.” Robert L. Carneiro, Curator Emeritus of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, is author of Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History.

"I find this a very insightful book, that will help readers to place current cultural developments within the framework of our common past, while contemplating what the future may bring." Fred Spier, University of Amsterdam, is President, International Big History Association, and author of Big History and the Future of Humanity.

Without imagination,  Ronald Hepburn argued, we cannot move from our ordinary concerns in their familiar, transient setting, to thoughts ‘on a cosmic scale and with a cosmos-transcending being’.  Whether through icons, metaphors, or symbols, imagination is in this view a necessary power for the life – and not merely for the discourse – of religion and religious experience. Yet this very strength as a mode of relating to the transcendent, a mode that sees in and through surroundings – thereby gaining an elevated, symbolic significance – is also the root of what makes imagination a liability, being ‘too ready to leap abysses in understanding and argumentation’. Centred around a first-personal account of religious experience, this article steers between the Scylla of constructivist scepticism and the Charybdis of interpretive charity and outlines a three-stage method that brackets doctrine from the account to lessen the tangles of interpretation. I argue that this method illuminates what Karl Jaspers calls the 'immanent transcendent'.

While there can be no doubt that philosophy and psychiatry are different fields of inquiry, there can also exist little doubt that there is a growing interest in philosophical issues in psychiatry.l How are these two fields related? How are we to appreciate both their differences and their common ground? What can psychiatry expect from philosophy, and vice versa? In this paper we will focus on phenomenology, which for several reasons remains at the heart of the questions just posed. We will do so by addressing the similarities and differences of the meaning of the term "phenomenology" as used in psychiatry and philosophy. Our focus on phenomenology should not obscure, however, our firm conviction that psychiatry must employ a variety of methods, concepts, and theories in order to illuminate and treat mental disorders.

EDITION 19-3 Psychologie der Weltanschauungen / Karl Jaspers.-Basel : Schwabe, 2019.-XCI, 509 S. ; 25 cm.-(Gesamtausgabe / Karl Jaspers : Abt. 1, Werke ; 6).-ISBN 978-3-7965-3832-2 : SFr. 148.00, EUR 148.00 [#6621] Der Philosoph Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) war nicht von Hause aus Philo-soph, 1 auch wenn sein Interesse daran weit zurückreicht. Da er aufgrund seiner eigenen gesundheitlichen Beeinträchtigung den Arztberuf nicht dau-erhaft ausübte, konnte er durch Umsattlung eine zweite Karriere als Philo-sophieprofessor starten, und so zu einem der bedeutendsten deutschen Philosophen seiner Zeit werden, der es vor allem in der Nachkriegszeit ab 1945 zu einer außerordentlichen Popularität brachte. 2 Den Wechsel von der Medizin bzw. Psychologie 3 zur Philosophie leitete in gewissem Sinne der hier im Rahmen der lobenswerten Jaspers-Gesamtausgabe des Schwabe-1 Seine wenig bekannte Dissertation befaßte sich mit Mädchen, die aus Heimweh zu Verbrecherinnen (Mord und Brandstiftung) wurden.-Siehe Heimweh und Verbrechen / Karl Jaspers. Mit Essays von Elisabeth Bronfen und Christine Poz-sár.

EDITION 18-1 Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung / Karl Jaspers. Hrsg. von Bernd Weidmann. -Basel : Schwabe, 2016. -XCIX, 625 S. ; 25 cm. -(Gesamtausgabe / Karl Jaspers ; Abt. 1, Werke ; 13). -ISBN 978-3-7965-3431-7 : SFr. 148.00, EUR 148.00 [#5109] Im Rahmen der Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Karl Jaspers (1883 -1969) 1 ist mit diesem Band ein schwergewichtiges Werk des späten Jaspers anzuzeigen. Die Ausgabe erscheint angesichts des langjährigen Wirkens von Jaspers in der Schweiz sinnvollerweise auch in einem schweizerischen Verlag. Der Schwabe-Verlag hat die Ausgabe schön hergestellt, so daß es ein Vergnügen ist, mit dem Band zu arbeiten. Der vorliegende Band 13 der ersten Abteilung ist nicht der erste in der seit 2016 erscheinenden Gesamtausgabe. 2 Parallel ist im Wallstein-Verlag eine sehr substantielle Auswahlausgabe von Jaspers-Korrespondenzen erschienen, die für die Philosophie-1 Zu Jaspers siehe "Wahrheit ist, was uns verbindet" : Karl Jaspers' Kunst zu philosophieren / hrsg. von Reinhard Schulz ... -Göttingen : Wallstein-Verlag, 2009. -512 S. ; 23 cm. -ISBN 978-3-8353-0423-9 : EUR 39.90 [#0576]. -Rez.: IFB 09-1/2 http://ifb.bsz-bw.de/bsz282704566rez-1.pdf -Karl Jaspers und Jean-Paul Sartre im Dialog : ihre Sicht auf Existenz, Freiheit und Verantwortung / Anton Hügli ; Manuela Hackel (Hrsg.). -Frankfurt am Main : Lang-Edition, 2015. -238 S. ; 22 cm. -ISBN 978-3-631-65139-1 : EUR 49.95 [#3986]. -Rez.: IFB 15-2 http://ifb.bsz-bw.de/bsz429559402rez-1.pdf 2 Zuvor war erschienen: Schriften zur Universitätsidee / Karl Jaspers. Hrsg. von Oliver Immel. -Basel : Schwabe, 2016. -LXXIII, 508 Seiten ; 25 cm. -(Gesamtausgabe / Karl Jaspers ; Abt. 1, Werke ; 21). -ISBN 978-3-7965-3423-2 : SFr. 108.00, EUR 108.00. -Seitdem liegt vor Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte / Karl Jaspers. Hrsg. von Kurt Salamun. -Basel : Schwabe, 2017. -XXXII, 284 S. ; 25 cm. -(Gesamtausgabe / Karl Jaspers ; Abt. 1, Werke ; 10). -ISBN 978-3-7965-3429-4 : SFr. 84.00, EUR 84.00. -Rezensionen beider Bände in IFB sind vorgesehen.

An attempt to phrase and tackle the question on just how justified a viewer is when reading into a film, for example philosophically. As primary examples I use and tie together themes from Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist magnum opus Being and Nothingness.

Traducción de UNA SOBRIA INQUIETUDINE. KARL LÖWITH E LA FILOSOFIA, FELTRINELLI, MILANO, 2004.
Primera biografía dedicada a Karl Löwith. Apoyado en un vasto archivo inédito y en la correspondencia del filósofo con grandes protagonistas de la cultura europea (Heidegger, Jaspers, Strauss, Arendt, Bultmann, Voegelin, Gadamer, Horckheimer, entre otros), el libro reconstruye la vida de Karl Löwith desde sus años de cercanía con Husserl, Weber, el George-Kreis y, sobre todo Heidegger, hasta el exilio impuesto por el nazismo, primero en Italia, luego en Japón y finalmente en EEUU, y su retorno a la Alemania de posguerra.-