The thought of Karl Jaspers, one of the foremost philosophers of existence, has been devoted to the explication of man’s situation in the world and the possibilities of his self-transcendence.
With the publication of Reason and Existenz, originally delivered as a series of five lectures at the University of Groningen in 1935, one of the most important of Jaspers’s philosophic works is made available to the English-speaking world. It concerns itself with a general statement of the principal philosophic categories which have given uniqueness to Jaspers’s thinking: existence, freedom and history, and the limit-situations of death, suffering, and sin. Written shortly after Jaspers’s major systematic work and before his analysis of the problem of truth, Reason and Existenz, occupies a primary position in the development of his thought.
One of the most famous European philosophers and, with Heidegger and Sartre, a foremost representative of existentialism, Karl Jaspers was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Basle.
“Every thoughtful reader must feel appreciation toward a philosopher who has lifted the controversy between 'rationalism' and 'existentialism' to a new and more creative level. This book will make history.”— Reinhold Niebuhr, The New Republic