Of all the great minds that have influenced contemporary thought, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus have had the most profound and lasting impact. These exemplary individuals taught us how to live as well as how to think. They were individual personalities, and seminal philosophers of unsurpassed importance.

Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus
Karl Jaspers

This text is taken from The Great Philosophers, Volume I, by Karl Jaspers. The Great Philosophers is Karl Jaspers’ four volume universal history of philosophy, a history organized around those philosophers who have influenced the course of human thought. The first two volumes of this work appeared in Jasper’s lifetime; the third and fourth were gathered from the vast material of his posthumous papers.

Karl Jaspers
1883-1969

. Karl Jaspers Society of North America
. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
. Wikipedia

Karl Jaspers was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher. Jaspers had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept this label.

Books written by Karl Jaspers include:

• General Psychopathology
• Kant: From The Great Philosophers, Vol. I
• Plato and Augustine: From The Great Philosophers, Volume I
• The Great Philosophers, Vol. II: The Original Thinkers – Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Anselm, Nicholas of Cusa, Spinoza, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna
• The Great Philosophers, Vol. III: Xenophanes, Democritus, Empedocles, Bruno, Epicurus, Boehme, Schelling, Leibniz, Aristotle, Hegel
• The Great Philosophers, Vol. IV: Descartes, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Einstein
• The Origin and Goal of History
• Philosophy of Existence
• The Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Pholosophy