From Publishers Weekly
Scrutinizing 10 philosophers from Epicurus to Hegel, Jaspers, the famed German existentialist (1883-1969), extracts the living essence of each philosopher's wisdom in these higly individualistic critiques. For Jaspers, Giordano Bruno, the Italian wandering scholar burnt at the stake by the Inquisition, is the founder of modern pantheism, while Democritus, the ancient Greek atomist, showed that "it is possible to live, without God, in tranquillity, serene and active." Jaspers also discusses the egalitarianism of philosophical poet Xenophanes; Empedocles as a self-styled prophet and savior; Aristotle's pursuit of truth through the intellect; religious mystic Jakob Boehme; and the systems of Leibniz and Schelling. Translated from the 1981 German edition of Jaspers's posthumous writings, this searching study complements the first two volumes of The Great Philosophers which were published in the 1960s.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Containing Volumes 3 and 4 of Jaspers's overview of individual philosophers through history, this translation includes his presentations of the systems, ideas, and historical significances of Xenophanes, Democritus, Empedocles, Bruno, Epicurus, Boehme, Aristotle, Schelling, Leibniz, and Hegel. Some chapters are simply edited lectures, but the individuals are given evenhanded and lucid treatment. All quotations are rendered by the translators into English, so that this book is truly available to lay readers with little or no academic training. Because of its clarity and the individuals covered, it belongs in most public and academic collections, while scholars will be interested in Jaspers's choices of characterizations of both the thinkers and their systems.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal. Poetry
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The German Jaspers was engaged in a comprehensive summary of the world's philosophers when he died in 1969, but he left the essentials in place. The volumes of his "universal history of philosophy," of which this is the third (the fourth is due next year), furnish the public library a nonephemeral acquisition that is a bit more elevated than the work of the middlebrow Durants. Jaspers lines up 10 famous philosophers--beginning with Aristotle, that obsessive systematizer who sorted everything with various degrees of modern permanence: rhetoric (up-to-date); politics (ditto); physics (not); and biology (doubly not). Epicurus, the expounder of hedonism, follows, and so completely dominates this particular outlook that his live-for-the-day disciples really have nothing to add, as long as they assert no extracorporeal existence for the soul. That opinion originated with the inventor of the atomic concept, Democritus, and such Being versus Nothingness metaphysics overarches the rest of Jaspers' profiles. In sentence after weighty sentence--and Jaspers writes very austerely--the seeker can at least recognize that behind the opacity of Hegel and Leibniz's thought lies the question that afflicts every human: What on earth am I doing here? Gilbert Taylor
