death_place death_date influenced birth_place era school_tradition influences main_interests birth_date article_title name region
new rochelle , new york , usa february 5 , 1993 -lrb- aged 89 -rrb- eric leon kass , vittorio hösle , harold bloom , john voegelin crowley , zygmunt bauman , hannah arendt , murray bookchin , mönchengladbach , rhine province , german empire 20th-century philosophy continental philosophy martin heidegger , edmund husserl , rudolf bultmann bioethics , political science , religion may 10 , 1903 hans jonas
 hans jonas western philosophers
hans jonas

hans jonas -lrb- may 10 , 1903 -- february 5 , 1993 -rrb- was a german-born philosopher , from 1955 to 1976 the alvin johnson professor of philosophy at the new school for social research in new york city .
jonas 's writings were very influential in different spheres .
for example , `` the gnostic religion '' , based on his early research on the gnosis and first published in 1958 , was for many years the standard work in english on the subject of gnosticism .
`` the imperative of responsibility '' -lrb- german 1979 , english 1984 -rrb- centers on social and ethical problems created by technology .
jonas insists that human survival depends on our efforts to care for our planet and its future .
he formulated a new and distinctive supreme principle of morality : `` act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life '' .
while `` the imperative of responsibility '' has been credited with catalyzing the environmental movement in germany , his work `` the phenomenon of life '' -lrb- 1966 -rrb- forms the philosophical undergirding of one major school of bioethics in america .
murray bookchin and leon kass both referred to hans jonas 's work as major , or primary , inspiration .
heavily influenced by martin heidegger , `` the phenomenon of life '' attempts to synthesize the philosophy of matter with the philosophy of mind , producing a rich existential understanding of biology , which ultimately argues for a simultaneously material and moral human nature .
his writing on the history of gnosticism revisits terrain covered by earlier standard works on the subject such as ernesto buonaiuti 's `` lo gnosticismo : storia di antiche lotte religiose '' -lrb- 1907 -rrb- , interpreting the religion from an existentialist philosophical viewpoint .
he was one of the first philosophers to concern himself with ethical questions in biological science .
jonas 's career is generally divided into three periods defined by his three primary works , but in reverse order : studies of gnosticism , studies of philosophical biology , and ethical studies .
