ABSTRACT
The author talks about the development of Karl Jaspers' thought as he made the intellectual transition from psychiatry to existential philosophy between 1909 and 1932, with the aim of explaining how Max Weber's personality and scholarship played a decisive role as catalyst. Jaspers began his scholarly career as a psychiatrist, but it was in philosophy that he established his lasting reputation, a discipline that he had never formally studied and only began teaching when he was nearly 40. Jaspers founded a new kind of philosophy that he called Existenzphilosophie or 'existential philosophy'. The dominant tendency, however, was to pursue psychopathology as if it were a natural science of the brain that would eventually yield deterministic laws. While Jaspers believed that clearer conceptual foundations were needed for psychopathology to qualify as a science, he doubted whether the natural sciences could supply all the necessary methods. The first concerns Kommunikation, a central concept of Jaspers' existential philosophy.
