This panel addresses the debate that has swirled in recent years around Karl Jaspers’ notion of an “Axial Age,” which is said to have occurred during the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE, when, he claimed, “Man as we know him today came into existence.”  The book developing this idea, The Origin and Goal of History, was intended as a post-Holocaust riposte to the Eurocentric conception of human history elaborated by Hegel in his Philosophy of History.  Jaspers identified fifth-century classical Greece, Palestine, India, and China as the ecumene across which modern man emerged.  The idea is that human beings made similar advances during roughly the same epoch, if with different inflections; the figures most associated with the Axial Age were Plato and Aristotle, the Jewish prophets, Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha), and Confucius.  These were without doubt momentous developments in human self-understanding; many of the world’s major intellectual, philosophical, and religious traditions stem from this period and from these figures.  A conception of human history that spans these different regions and intellectual traditions clearly advances beyond the Eurocentric to include major regions of the non-European world.  Yet the original notion of the Axial Age leaves out Christianity and Islam, which raises questions about its viability.  Moreover, some have argued that there are other periods that qualify as an "Axial Age," especially modernity.  This panel will explore the various meanings and interpretations of the Axial Age as crucial background to studying European modernity and its future.