Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz
by Hans Jonas
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Hans Jonas (1903-93) was a German Jew, pupil of Heidegger and Bultmann, lifelong friend and colleague of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his generation. The range of his topics never obscures their unifying thread: that our mortality is at the root of our moral responsibility to safeguard humanity's future. Mortality and Morality both consummates and demonstrates the basic thrust of Jonas's thought: the inseparability of ethics show more and metaphysics, the reality of values at the center of being. show lessTags
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Hans Jonas (1903-93) was a German Jew, pupil of Heidegger and Bultmann, lifelong friend and colleague of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his generation. The range of his topics never obscures their unifying thread: that our mortality is at the root of our moral responsibility to safeguard humanity's future. Mortality and Morality both consummates and demonstrates the basic thrust of Jonas's thought: the inseparability of ethics and metaphysics, the reality of values at the center of being.
http://nupress.northwestern.edu/title.cfm?ISBN=0-8101-1286-8
http://nupress.northwestern.edu/title.cfm?ISBN=0-8101-1286-8
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60+ Works 1,708 Members
Hans Jonas was a well-known Jewish thinker, an early and influential biomedical ethicist, and an equally early and influential philosopher of technology in the United States and his native Germany. Born in 1904 in Monchengladbach, Jonas studied under Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg before Hitler came to power and Heidegger became show more chancellor of the university. He received his doctorate in 1928 from the University of Marburg. In 1933 he fled Germany and, in 1964, publicly repudiated Heidegger because of his Nazi connections. Jonas taught in Jerusalem and Canada before becoming a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1955, where he was chair of the philosophy department (1957--63) and Johnson Professor of Philosophy (from 1966 until his retirement in 1976). Jonas is best known for his neo-Kantian ethics of responsible caution in the face of the awesome power of modern technology---especially the power of modern biotechnology, including genetic engineering. According to Jonas, we must consult our fears and not our hopes when understanding technological ventures that can have a potentially devastating impact on what it means to be human (and therefore ethical). More than half of Jonas's books were written in German, including an early version of his greatest work, The Imperative of Responsibility (1984). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz
- Important places*
- Auschwitz, Klein-Polen, Polen
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