Hans Jonas

Discusses the ethical implications of modern technology and examines the responsibility of humanity for the fate of the world

In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age

The Imperative of Responsibility

Eleonore Jonas

One of the most prominent thinkers of his generation, Hans Jonas wrote on topics as diverse as the philosophy of biology, ethics and cosmology. This work sets forth a systematic philosophy of biological facts, laid out in support of his claim that mind is prefigured throughout organic existence.

Toward a Philosophical Biology

The Phenomenon of Life

The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity

The Gnostic Religion

Mit einem Nachwort von Robert Habeck »Hans Jonas’ Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Umweltethik ist kaum zu überschätzen.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung Als Das Prinzip Verantwortung 1979 wenige Wochen vor der Gründung der Grünen erstmals erschien, war der Treibhauseffekt noch nicht im allgemeinen Bewusstsein angekommen. Heute sind die Auswirkungen des Klimawandels evident: Überflutungen in warmen Wintern, Waldbrände in trockenen Sommern. In seinem Standardwerk der Umweltethik formulierte Jonas allerdings schon vor vier Jahrzenten Antworten auf drängende moralische Fragen, die nun dank der »Fridays for Future«-Bewegung wieder ganz oben auf der Agenda stehen: Sind wir verantwortlich für den Fortbestand der Menschheit auf der Erde? Ist jeder Einzelne in der Pflicht? Und wie lassen sich Staaten und deren Institutionen zum Handeln bewegen? Jonas argumentiert für eine radikale Ethik der ökologischen Verantwortung, der Individuen, Unternehmen und Regierungen gleichermaßen unterworfen sind. Dabei geht er mit unserem bedingungslosen Technikglauben genauso hart ins Gericht wie mit den Dynamiken des Machterhalts in demokratischen Systemen, in denen Zukunft höchstens bis zur nächsten Wahl gedacht wird. Sein Plädoyer für den »Vorrang der schlechten vor der guten Prognose« ist aktueller denn je.

Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation

Das Prinzip Verantwortung

Philosophical Essays: from Ancient Creed to Technological Man

L'espèce humaine se trouve à un carrefour. Dotée d'une puissance en constante extension, il lui faut désormais opérer les choix ou assumer les hésitations qui lui éviteront le sort de l'apprenti sorcier. La futurologie apparaît alors non comme un charlatanisme de plus, mais comme l'indispensable évaluation des effets à longue portée, pour les générations à venir, des révolutions technologiques déferlantes d'où peuvent surgir le meilleur et le pire. Dresser les critères de cette évaluation, telle est la tâche du philosophe. Et s'il fait appel à l'éthique, ce ne sera jamais pour brimer ou pour briser la vie, mais au contraire pour l'aider à parer les plus graves dangers, afin de lui offrir un nouveau champ de développement.

Pour une éthique du futur

الديانة الغنوصية

un'etica per la civiltà tecnologica

Il principio responsabilità

In questo saggio si tratta di una problematica teologica legata al tema del male e alla sua manifestazione concreta nei campi di sterminio nazista. La proposta teologica ivi contenuta non pretende una risoluzione del problema della teodicea, ma apre la strada ad un concetto di Dio che rinuncia alla propria onnipotenza a favore dell'agire libero e responsabile dell'uomo.

una voce ebraica

Il concetto di Dio dopo Auschwitz

When Hans Jonas died in 1993, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogenarian, he became a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but the Nazi regime forced him to leave Germany for London in 1933. He later emigrated to Palestine and eventually enlisted in the British Army's Jewish Brigade to fight against Hitler. Following the Israeli War of Independence, he emigrated to the United States and took a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became part of a circle of friends around Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, which included Adolph Lowe and Paul Tillich. This memoir, a diverse collection of previously unpublished materials--diaries, letters, interviews, and public statements--has been organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas's life and philosophy. Because Jonas's life spanned the entire twentieth century, this memoir provides nuanced pictures of German Jewry during the Weimar Republic, of German Zionism, of the Jewish emigrants in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and of German Jewish émigré intellectuals in New York. Since Memoirs was first published in 2008, interest in the work of Hans Jonas has grown among American academics in recent years.

Memoirs

A pivotal volume in the collected works of Hans Jonas (1903-1993), one of most important German-American philosophers of the last half of the 20th century, this edition is the only one to include contributions from his three primary areas of achievement: philosophical reflection on gnosticism, on biology, and on technology.

From Ancient Creed to Technological Man

Philosophical Essays

A compilation of diaries, memoirs, letters, interviews, and other writings by the late German-Jewish philosopher and author of The Imperative of Responsibility offers a detailed portrait of German Jewry in the Weimar Republic, German Zionism, Jewish immigrants in 1930s and 1940s Palestine, German Jewish intellectuals in New York, and his own life work.

Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Zweiter Teilband:Tragweite und Aktualität einer Zukunftsethik

Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Hans Jonas

Lawrence Vogel

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.

Hans Jonas

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