In 1932 Karl Jaspers publishes his three-volume Philosophie in Berlin, setting out Existenz, the self that becomes itself only in boundary situations: death, guilt, conflict, chance. Jaspers, with Heidegger, gives the German form of the movement its name, Existenzphilosophie, on the eve of the catastrophe that will scatter it.
Tagged: Existentialism
The Event
- Date
- 1932 (exact)
- Era
- Existenz Between the Wars; Standard periodization of existentialist history
- Location
- Berlin; today Berlin, Germany
- Traditions
- Existentialism
- Streams
- Existentialism
- Key figures
- Karl Jaspers
- Key texts
- Philosophie
Primary Sources
- Jaspers, Karl. Philosophie. Berlin: Springer, 1932.
Secondary Sources
- Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.
- Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
- Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005.
Provenance: HIST-1424; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
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1864
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Kierkegaard's Either/Or
1843
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Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death
1849
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Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
1945
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Sartre's Being and Nothingness
1943
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Sartre's Nausea
1938
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Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life
1913
World View
Existentialism
Existentialism holds that life has no built-in meaning: each person, radically free, must create a self and accept responsibility for that creation.