Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.

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 This memoir, a diverse collection of previously unpublished materials-diaries, letters, interviews, and public statements-has been organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas's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 emigre 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.

Philosophical Essays is 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. Of the four books published in English during his lifetime, it is the only one to include contributions from his three primary areas of achievement: philosophical reflection on gnosticism, on biology, and on technology - hence the subtitle, "From Ancient Creed to Technological Man." The three sections of the book are, however, given in reverse order with essays on "Science, Technology, and Ethics" preceding papers on "Organism, Mind, and History" and "Religious Thought of the First Christian Centuries." The temporally ultimate project is that which Jonas sees as having philosophical priority. This collection of 18 essays originally published between 1965 and 1974 - that is, after completion of The Phenomenon of Life (1966) but before The Imperative of Responsibility (1984) - manifests the most intensive integration of Jonas's three projects. As such, this volume provides special witness to the inherent unity of what might otherwise be seen as more episodic work. In the Introduction Jonas himself argues for both a biographical and a philosophical unity, the latter of which is emphasized in a new foreword by Carl Mitcham of the European Graduate School.

The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity

One of the most prominent thinkers of his generation, Hans Jonas wrote on topics as diverse as the philosophy of biology, ethics, social philosophy, cosmology, and Jewish theology -- always with a view to understanding morality as the root of our moral responsibility to safeguard humanity's future. A classic of phenomenology and existentialism and arguably Jonas's greatest work, The Phenomenon of Life sets forth a systematic and comprehensive philosophy -- an existential interpretation of biological facts laid out in support of Jonas's claim that mind is prefigured throughout organic existence.

At the center of this philosophy is an attack on the fundamental assumptions underlying modern philosophy since Descartes, primarily dualism. Dissenting from the dualistic view of value as a human projection onto nature, Jonas's critique affirms the classical view that being harbors the good. In a brilliant synthesis of the ancient and modern, Jonas draws upon existential philosophy to justify core insights of the classical tradition. This critique transcends the historical limits of its phenomenological methodology and existential ethical stance to take its place among the most scientifically nuanced contemporary accounts of moral nature. It lays the foundation for an ethic of responsibility grounded in an assignment by Being to protect the natural environment that has allowed us to spring from it.