Commentary on "Chris Walker's Interpretation of Karl Jaspers' Phenomenology"

Carl E. Fulwiler, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Marshal F. Folstein, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

What value is this scholarly debate about the origins of Jaspers' phenomenology to psychiatric clinicians? For one thing, it might help kindle enough interest among scholars and clinicians in Jaspers' General Psychopathology (GP) to warrant its reprinting. This would expand the psychiatrist's appreciation of the relevance of philosophy to medical thinking and patient care. In the GP, Jaspers quotes Kant's opinion that "the psychiatrist's competence is really commensurate with how far his education and knowledge would qualify him to belong to the philosophic faculty" (Jaspers 1963, 36).