Hans Joas and Matthias Bormuth eds., "The Anthem Companion to Karl Jaspers" (Anthem Press, 2025)

Jul 1, 2025

Hans Joas, a leading sociologist at Humboldt University, and Matthias Bormuth, a professor specializing in intellectual history, dive deep into Karl Jaspers’ influential philosophy. They discuss Jaspers’ connections with pivotal thinkers like Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, explore his insights on the Axial Age, and examine his critiques of tyranny. The conversation also touches on Jaspers’ views on religion, capitalism, and existentialism, showcasing his enduring relevance in contemporary philosophical discourse and the challenges of modernity.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Weber’s Kantian Influence on Jaspers

Max Weber deeply influenced Jaspers as a mentor and philosopher.
Jaspers saw Weber as a Kantian thinker focused on freedom and life decisions.

ADVICE

Read Weber as Philosopher

To understand Weber, read him as a philosopher deeply engaged with human freedom.
Avoid simplistic labels; embrace the complexity of his social scientific and philosophical integration.

INSIGHT

Jaspers’ Political Views Shift

Jaspers initially embraced a cultural elitism, favoring leadership by educated elites over mass democratic rule.
He opposed Nazi authoritarianism and withdrew from such elitist ideas after 1933.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

The Anthem Companion to Karl Jaspers (Anthem Press, 2025) edited by Hans Joas and Matthias Bormuth is a collection of articles by an international group of leading experts has its special focus on the relevance of Karl Jaspers’s philosophy for the social sciences. It also includes classical evaluations of Jaspers’s thinking by renowned authors Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas. Several chapters are devoted to the relationship between Jaspers and his teacher (Max Weber), his famous student (Hannah Arendt) and crucial figures in his intellectual world (Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel). Others deal with his relevance for disciplines from psychiatry to the study of religion and the historico-sociological research about the Axial Age, a term coined by Jaspers. In his introduction, editor Hans Joas tries to systematise Jaspers’s relevance for the contemporary social sciences and to explain why Parsons had called him a ‘social scientist’s philosopher’.

The contributions to this volume deal, on one hand, with thematic areas for which Jaspers’s work has been crucial: the Axial Age debate, a non-theological and non-reductive theory of religion; the understanding of psychoanalysis and psychiatry; and the possibilities of a diagnosis of one’s own age. On the other hand, they put Jaspers in contrast with Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel and Hannah Arendt. The volume also contains important chapters by Talcott Parsons, who called Jaspers ‘a social scientist’s philosopher’, and by Jürgen Habermas, who contrasts his own views on the role of communicative ethics in an age of religious pluralism with those of Jaspers.

The book promises to become an indispensable source in the re-evaluation of Jaspers’s thinking in the years to come.
Hans Joas is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Matthias Bormuth is Professor for Comparative Intellectual History at the University of Oldenburg and is also the Director of the Karl Jaspers Haus.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology