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Categoria: Hans Jonas

  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(IX)

    And here is where I get stuck, and where we all get stuck. For the very same movement which put us in possession of the powers that have now to be regulated by norms — the movement of modern knowledge called science — has by a necessary complementarity eroded the foundations from which norms could…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(VIII)

    The ethically relevant common feature in all the examples adduced is what I like to call the inherently “utopian” drift of our actions under the conditions of modern technology, whether it works on non-human or on human nature, and whether the “utopia” at the end of the road be planned or unplanned. By the kind…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(VII)

    Similar comparisons could be made with all the other historical forms of the ethics of contemporaneity and immediacy. The new order of human action requires a commensurate ethics of foresight and responsibility, which is as new as are the issues with which it has to deal. We have seen that these are the issues posed…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(VI)

    Kant’s categorical imperative said: “Act so that you can will that the maxim of your action be made the principle of a universal law.” The “can” here invoked is that of reason and its consistency with itself: Given the existence of a community of human agents (acting rational beings), the action must be such that…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(V)

    Returning to strictly intra-human considerations, there is another ethical aspect to the growth of techne as a pursuit beyond the pragmatically limited terms of former times. Then, so we found, techne was a measured tribute to necessity, not the road to mankind’s chosen goal — a means with a finite measure of adequacy to well-defined…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(IV)

    All this has decisively changed. Modern technology has introduced actions of such novel scale, objects, and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them. The Antigone chorus on the demotes, the wondrous power, of man would have to read differently now; and its admonition to the individual to honor the laws…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(III)

    It follows that the knowledge that is required — besides the moral will — to assure the morality of action, fitted these limited terms: it was not the knowledge of the scientist or the expert, but knowledge of a kind readily available to all men of good will. Kant went so far as to say…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(II)

    Let us extract from the preceding those characteristics of human action which are relevant for a comparison with the state of things today. 1. All dealing with the non-human world, i.e., the whole realm of techne (with the exception of medicine), was ethically neutral – in respect both of the object and the subject of…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(I)

    The novel powers I have in mind are, of course, those of modern technology. My first point, accordingly, is to ask how this technology affects the nature of our acting, in what ways it makes acting under its dominion different from what it has been through the ages. Since throughout those ages man was never…

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  • Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics

    All previous ethics — whether in the form of issuing direct enjoinders to do and not to do certain things, or in the form of defining principles for such enjoinders, or in the form of establishing the ground of obligation for obeying such principles — had these interconnected tacit premises in common-, that the human…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (XII)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” XII There may be in the offing another, still deeper-reaching, feat of the technological revolution. When we check what sciences have successively contributed to it — mechanics, chemistry, electronics, and, just beginning, nuclear physics — we notice the absence…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (XI)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” XI Modern technology, in the sense which makes it different from all previous technology, was touched off by the industrial revolution, which itself was touched off by social and economic developments entirely outside the theoretical development we have been…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (X)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” X It is a common misconception that the evolutions of modern science and modern technology went hand in hand. The truth is that the great, theoretical breakthrough to modern science occurred in the seventeenth century, while the breakthrough of…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (IX)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” IX What has neither will nor wisdom and is indifferent to itself solicits no respect. Awe before nature’s mystery gives way to the disenchanted knowingness which grows with the success of the analysis of all things into their primitive…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VIII)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” VIII The plain picture of classical, Newtonian mechanics here drawn, whose prime data were nothing but mass and acceleration, was later, especially from the nineteenth century on, made more complex by the addition of electromagnetism, radiating energy, atomic valency,…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VII)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” VII After this analytical summary of the direct conceptual content of the theoretical revolution in dynamics, a brief metaphysical evaluation of it is in order. We said at one point that what the innovation was originally about was not…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VI)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” VI It only remains to draw one last inference so as to have this account of the conceptual revolution terminate in a full-fledged mechanics of nature. To use abridged labels, it means completing the Galilean with the Newtonian record.…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (V)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” V All this is far from obvious. In fact, all appearances are on the side of the opposite, Aristotelian view. In our common experience, bodies do come to rest when the force propelling them ceases to act: the wagon…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (IV)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” IV The new cosmology called for a new physics but did not provide one itself. It offered a new image of the universe but no explanation of it. It showed, by an ingenious combination of hypothesis, observation, and mathematical…

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  • Hans Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (III)

    Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution” III How this came about is a story involving many things besides the history of science. The movement that remade thought from its foundations was not an isolated event but had a background commensurate in breadth with its own…

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