Hans Jonas 1903 – 1993

Hans Jonas was a German-Jewish philosopher, a student of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bultmann, who emigrated first to Palestine and then to North America. After early work on Gnosticism and the philosophy of life, he turned in his later years to an ethics adequate to the unprecedented powers of modern technology. The Imperative of Responsibility argues that traditional ethics, oriented toward the near-term and toward face-to-face encounters, is inadequate to a civilization whose actions can affect distant generations and the integrity of the biosphere. His thought has been foundational for environmental ethics and bioethics.