Karl Jaspers

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-103
Author(s):  
Matthias Bormuth
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Wilhelm Dilthey ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Self Reflection

This chapter discusses the psychopathological ideas of Karl Jaspers, one of the founding fathers of phenomenological thinking. Jaspers always admired researchers who used the means of natural sciences in psychiatry, but he relied more on the psychology of understanding conceptualized and exercised in the humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) by Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. The chapter first provides an overview of Jaspers’s intellectual biography as a psychiatrist before analyzing his methodological horizons of understanding psychology. It then examines what philosophical considerations motivated Jaspers to draw the “limits of understanding” closer and stricter in the last edition of his book General Psychopathology, first published in 1913. It suggests that these limits can be determined as an existential application of Immanuel Kant’s idea and antinomy of freedom. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Jaspers’s claim that existence-philosophical self-reflection constitutes a necessary supplement to psychotherapy.

The influence of Max Weber on the concept of empathic understanding (Verstehen) in the psychopathology of Karl Jaspers

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Aragona
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Empathic Understanding ◽  
Key Concepts

This paper explores key concepts in the writings of Weber in the years preceding the publication of the first edition of Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie, focusing on the concept of understanding ( Verstehen). This is a key hermeneutic concept and is discussed within the larger context of the epistemological and methodological reflections of both authors. They similarly tried to import the understanding within the humanistic disciplines as a rigorous but anti-reductionist scientific method. However, while Weber tried to mix explanation and understanding according to a legal metaphor, Jaspers retained Dilthey’s sharper distinction between explanation in natural sciences and understanding in humanistic sciences. Finally, Jaspers’ understanding is relatively more empathic, while Weber’s understanding is more rationalistic.

The corrosion of character: Work and personality in the modern age

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-155
Author(s):  
Gregor Fitzi ◽  
Vincenzo Mele
Keyword(s):  
Current Issue ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Character Work ◽  
Major Factors ◽  
Insight Into

The topic of this imaginary dialogue between Georg Simmel and Max Weber is the relation between work – in the sense of labour – and personality. Its aim is to show that the thinking of these ‘founding fathers’ of sociology can furnish valuable insight into the current issue of the corrosion of character in contemporary post-Fordist society. The concept of work still represents one of the major factors determining modern individuals’ ability (or inability) to formulate personal, stable identities that enable them to become fully socialized. Both Simmel and Weber make reference to a common theoretical background that views the human being as a creature with originally rational potential, who is faced with the task of becoming a personality by means of consciously chosen life behaviour: This is evident in the parallelism between Simmel’s interest in the concept of ‘style of life’ ( Der Stil des Lebens) and Weber’s research on the ‘life conduct’ ( Lebensführung) that arose in Western rationalistic culture.

Review: Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 319-324
Author(s):  
Thomas Kemple
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The West ◽  
Karl Jaspers

Austin Harrington’s monumental investigation into the ‘radical centrists’ of the Weimar Republic is discussed in terms of key themes such as universalism, cosmopolitanism, and the critique of Eurocentrism that still resonate with recent debates. Contrasting the voices of lesser known critical intellectuals from this period such as Karl Jaspers and Kark Mannheim with the political writings of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, as well as with the reactionary positions of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, Harrington’s book affords a useful critical perspective on ‘protesting the West’, yesterday and today.

How is history possible? Georg Simmel on empathy and realism

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-237
Author(s):  
Barry Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Past Century ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Wilhelm Dilthey ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

Georg Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay, along with related works, proposes that history is largely a reflection of how well the historian can penetrate the mind of his or her subject. He rejects realism, but if scholars do not know events as they essentially were, they cannot know how much of their empathy-based knowledge is warped by their own perspective and how much is authentic. Given George Herbert Mead’s analytical account of reflexive interaction and the recently discovered neural basis of empathy and its dependence on context, the present study shows Simmel’s work to be far more plausible than it seemed over the past century. This essay not only demonstrates where Simmel’s empathy-based argument succeeds and fails but also clarifies his view on the nature of historical reality and how the historian’s perspective clarifies as well as distorts his sources. In the process, Simmel’s philosophy of history is placed in a lineage ranging from Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber to R. S. Collingswood, Robert Darnton, and other contemporary cultural historians.

Perspectivas Interdisciplinaridades e Linguagem nas Ciências Humanas

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Alzira Lobo de Arruda Campos
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Wilhelm Dilthey ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Fernand Braudel

As ciências humanas discutiram a questão da interdisciplinaridade ao longo do século XX. Mas, já no século anterior, figuras notáveis, como Wilhelm Dilthey e Karl Marx, questionavam-se sobre os paradigmas monistas da explicação e da compreensão. Interrogação reproduzida, entre muitos, por Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Michel Serres. Em Educação, o grupo de Doutorado em Ciências da Educação, de Paris VIII, há 30 anos adotou a multirreferencialidade como metodologia hegemônica.

scholarly journals Social doctrine of Islam

2004 ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Ayder Rustamov
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
Special Place ◽  
The Social ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
The Many ◽  
Theoretical Developments

The main factors determining the dynamics of the social development of a country, in addition to economic and political, include spiritual components: religion, culture and national traditions. Among the many theoretical developments, a special place is occupied by the social doctrines of world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism. According to such authoritative scholars as Sergiy Bulgakov, Max Weber and Ivan Ilyin, it is religious foundations that are the sources of social development of various types of civilizations, and, in the figurative expression of Karl Jaspers, their axial (pivotal) and most valuable characteristics around which the course of history unfolds

scholarly journals The implications of nostalgia in German modern sociology

Sociologija ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-236
Author(s):  
Ana Petrov
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Social Loss ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Traditional Communities

In this article, I deal with nostalgia as an implicit category in the 19th-century German sociological discourses. I draw on the approaches that argue that sociology can be seen as a nostalgic social science since the sociologists? discourses were focused on the issues of causes, characteristics, and consequences of the modern age for individuals and society. Trying to explicate modern society, usually by comparing it to the premodern forms of social order, modern sociologists shaped dichotomous categories that were used for the definition of basic sociological concepts, one of the typical ones being the dichotomy between modern society and traditional communities. I here argue that modern sociologists constructed their theories in relation to the idea of a lack or loss, i.e. in relation to the question of what the modern society left behind during its growth: community, spirit or freedom. An alternative, a solution, or simply a utopian object for making comparison are found exactly in the object that is lost - in the nostalgic reflection on those aspects of humanity that were no longer possible in the modern age. Hence, I argue that modern sociology can be defined as a certain discourse on social loss. This will be elaborated on the examples of theories of Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel.

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