Partially examined life precognitions introduce philosophical topics for upcoming episodes

to give you a few weeks to do the reading yourself.

They also serve as quick standalone summaries of the work.

You can read more about these topics, get the words we cover, and listen to Partially

Examined Life Conversations at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

This is Mark Lintonmeyer introducing Karl Jasper's essay on my philosophy from 1941.

Karl Jasper's was one of the fathers of German existentialism.

He was an older colleague and friend of Heidegger's, and some of the content of Heidegger's

being and time was written in direct reaction to Jasper's ideas.

Jasper's introduced the term existence and gave us the picture of existentialism as prefigured

by Nietzsche and Kirchegard, whose important similarities Jasper's thought outweighed their

differences.

Peter Camu and Sartre are atheist existentialists, and Boober isn't explicitly religious

existentialist.

Jasper's presents us with a middle path, affirming along with Kant that any statements about

the existence or non-existence of God are really unwarranted, but also stressing the importance

of the question itself to human life.

Is there some part of reality that transcends the immediate data of our senses, and that

which science investigates?

Jasper's was born in 1883 and started his career as a scientist, working in a psychiatric

hospital, and then as a psychology teacher, focusing his studies on mental illness.

In the beginning of On My Philosophy, he describes how this work gave him high standards

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