The roots of human responsibility

Autores/as

  • Angela Michelis University of Turin, Italy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7213/1980-5934.29.046.AO02

Resumen

Starting from Hans Jonas’ works, this essay researches the bases of human responsibility and its reasoning is made up of four points. 1. He was aware of how his experience had influenced his thought and he questioned what means reflecting starting from extreme situations: «The apocalyptic state of things, the threatening collapse of a world, the climatic crisis of civilization, the proximity of death, the stark nakedness to which all the issues of life were stripped, all these were ground enough to take a new look at the very foundations of our being and to review the principles by which we guide our thinking on them». 2. Faced with these situations he rediscovered the richness of the Ancients’ thought. For example, the Stoics inherited and transformed the illuminating aspects of the theory that conceived of the ‘being’ as contemplation of the whole, which had permeated Greek natural philosophy and scientific speculation. They took it on as the capacity to identify one’s own most internal principle with the principle of the whole, in a more religious sense. The discovery in the whole of what is felt to be the highest and noblest in human beings – like reason, order, and form - makes our orientation towards a super-regulating end a liberating wisdom. 3. Jonas considers that starting from XVII century  the two aspects, here distinct as external and internal, remain at the core of the issue so far as the problem of freedom is concerned. Moreover, theoretical efforts now move in the direction of rendering, of discovering a conception of freedom which is logically compatible with causal determinism, while in the history of philosophy, the problem of freedom was not born in the sphere of logic. So it is necessary to rethink Modernity and how it is possible to found human freedom and responsibility nowadays.

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Citas

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JONAS, H. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Teil. 2: Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954.

JONAS, H. The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the

Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

JONAS, H. Augustinus und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem. Eine philosophische Studie zum pelagianischen Streit, intr. di J.M. ROBINSON, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965, 2nd ed. rev. and integrated.

JONAS, H. The Phenomenon of Life. Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.

JONAS, H. Problems of Freedom, 1966. In MICHELIS A., Libertà e responsabilità nella filosofia di Hans Jonas del secondo dopoguerra, PhD Dissertation vol. II, Turin: Turin University, 2005 (Italian translation and English script of the unpublished typescript of H. Jonas’s course, Problems of Freedom in 1966 at New School for Social Research of New York) .

JONAS, H. “Problemi di Libertà”, 1970, edited by Emidio Spinelli with the collaboration of, and translation into Italian by, Angela Michelis, Torino: Aragno, 2010 (a second and revised course on “Problems of Freedom” was given by Hans Jonas in 1970 at New School for Social Research of New York).

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Publicado

2017-04-17

Cómo citar

Michelis, A. (2017). The roots of human responsibility. Revista De Filosofía Aurora, 29(46), 307–333. https://doi.org/10.7213/1980-5934.29.046.AO02