Tikvah

Hans Jonas was a philosopher whose ideas had a profound impact on many areas of modern thought and public policy. He began his intellectual odyssey as a student of Marin Heidegger and Rudolph Bultmann and an interpreter of Gnosticism. In 1933, political events led to a hiatus from scholarship. Jonas, committed to the Zionist cause from his youth, left Germany for Palestine, joined the British Army in 1939, and later fought in the Israeli war of independence. In the 1950’s Jonas relocated to North America where he turned his scholarly eye from ancient Gnosticism to what he took to be its close cousin, modern nihilism. He produced a highly original philosophy of organic nature and then applied the ideas he developed there to contemporary problems in ethics and policy. In doing so, he became a founding figure of what we now know as “bioethics” and “environmental ethics.” There has been a recent surge in scholarship on Hans Jonas in the English speaking world, occasioned in part by the recent translation of his Memoirs. Much of this scholarship has focused on the relation of Jonas’s thought, both in ethics and the philosophy of biology, to the Jewish intellectual tradition. The Tikvah Working Group on Hans Jonas will move this dialogue forward, asking fundamental questions about this thinker’s profound ideas and their relation to problems and issues in contemporary Jewish thought.