Abstract
Karl Jaspers’ articulation of the Axial Age thesis has led to a contemporary explosion of scholarship on the topic. The history of scholarship on the Axial Age is briefly summarized before focusing on Jaspers’ proposal: the Axial Age as a breakthrough to transcendence is a dividing line within world history was a spiritual revolution that reoriented human consciousness toward universality, mystery, and individual inwardness. It provides a new locus of identification that transcends prior limits of tribe, region, and state. The different Axial Age movements can be understood as having a family resemblance in how each organizes its defining Axial factors into civilizationally specific forms. Jaspers proposes an “ideal of boundless communication” as the way to nonreductively think their plurality as constituting a universal.
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