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.

Hans Jonas, a pupil of Heidegger and a colleague of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research, was one of the most prominent phenomenologists of his generation. This carefully chosen anthology of Jonas's shorter writings - on topics from Jewish philosophy to philosophy of religion to philosophy of biology and social philosophy - reveals their range without obscuring their central unifying thread: that as living, biological beings, we are also beings who die, and who must consider the implications for current and future ethical and social relations. Grounded in Jonas's belief in the inseparability of ethics and metaphysics - the reality of values at the centre of being - and shaped by his experience as a Holocaust survivor, the deeply personal essays ""Mortality and morality"" arise from a Jewish thinker's attempt to make sense of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century. Lawrence Vogel's insightful introduction provides both historical and philosophical contexts in which to understand the importance and gravity of Jonas's thought.

Critics have charged that Martin Heidegger's account of authenticity is morally nihilistic, that his fundamental ontology is either egocentric or chauvinistic; and many see Heidegger's turn to Nazism in 1933 as following logically from an indifference, and even hostility, to ""otherness"" in the premises of his early philosophy. In ""The Fragile ""We"", ethical implications of Heidegger's ""being and time"", Lawrence Vogel presents 3 interpretations of authentic existence - the existentialist, the historicist, and the cosmopolitan - each of which is a plausible version of the personal ideal depicted in ""being and time."" He then draws parallels between these interpretations and three moments in the contemporary liberal-communitarian debate over the relationship of the ""I"" and the ""We."" His book contributes both to a diagnosis of what there is about ""Being and time"" that invites moral nihilism and to a sense of how fundamental ontology might be recast so that ""the other"" is accorded an appropriate place in an account of human existence.