Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

Este libro de Karl Jaspers no es un aporte mas a la bibliografia suscitada por el pensamiento de Nietzsche sino un verdadero hito en la historia de la filosofia. Jaspers plantea la singularidad extrema del hombre que influyo en tantas personalidades del mundo contemporaneo -desde Freud, Jung y Heidegger hasta Hannah Arendt, Foucault y Deleuze- y pone de manifiesto el aspecto revulsivo de sus actitudes y actividades, que tantas incomprensiones y malentendidos acarrearon en el tiempo en que le toco vivir y en los anos que siguieron. Aparte de aclarar el significado de muchos vocablos personales de Nietzsche, como voluntad de poder, superhombre, devenir, eterno retorno, Jaspers hace use de una admirable claridad y precision para, por un lado, delimitar y por otro extremar el verdadero alcance de cada uno de esos conceptos. Nietzsche, que se describia a si mismo como "el mas oculto entre los que ocultan," encuentra en esta indagacion sistematica y exhaustiva a su comentador a interprete ideal. Karl Jaspers nos devuelve una inteligencia y una sensibilidad vivas y una poderosa vision del mundo. Nietzsche se atrevio a pensar, con una libertad adquirida al costo de su propia reputacion de filosofo, cuestiones y relaciones de una actualidad insoslayable. Jaspers las observa y las analiza con la misma pasion.

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Karl Jaspers was one of the originators of German existentialism. He began his career as a psychiatrist but was increasingly concerned about philosophical and moral issues. His was "a lucid and flexible intelligence in the service of a genuine and passionate concern for mankind." Removed from his professorship at the University of Heidelberg by the Nazis in 1937, he was reinstated in 1945 on the approval of the American occupation forces. In 1949 he went to the University of Basel. The New York Times wrote of him in his lifetime: "Jaspers shows himself . . . to be one of the most diligent and sensitive students of contemporary history. He has a good eye for the present because he knows what to fear in it---particularly the loss of individual freedom."

Jaspers was deeply concerned about the human condition, and in his book The Future of Mankind (1957), entitled in its updated edition The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (1961), he attempted to arouse conscience in the face of the deadly danger of atomic warfare "at the same time . . . attempt[ing] to apply the principles of his philosophy to a new field, and to lay the foundations of a political philosophy" (Times Literary Supplement). After the German publication of this book, Jaspers was awarded the German Peace Prize at the 1958 Frankfurt Book Fair. Hannah Arendt, who had been his student and a translator of some of his works, made the presentation.

Jaspers's multivolume work, The Great Philosophers---edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Ralph Manheim, and published in English from 1962 to 1966---was hailed by the Library Journal as "a major work, a brilliant book . . . Jaspers defends the unity of philosophy and his aim is to make philosophy available to all, to provide the serous reader with a guide "to the thinking of the great philosophers and to a personal encounter with them."

The obituary of Jaspers in the New York Times said in assessing him: "With Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers was one of the makers and shapers of existentialist philosophy. For almost 50 years, in books, essays and lectures, he strove to give a personalist answer to modern man's questions about his own nature and the nature of existence."

(Bowker Author Biography)