Tag: Hans Jonas

II My contention here is, to repeat it once more, that the theoretical beginnings – what we may call the ontological breakthrough occurring at the onset of the modern age and laying the foundations on which the edifice of modern science was reared – was the all important event. To understand this event historically, we…

Todas as éticas anteriores — seja na forma de emitir ordens diretas para fazer e não fazer certas coisas, seja na forma de definir princípios para tais ordens, seja na forma de estabelecer o fundamento da obrigação de obedecer a tais princípios — tinham em comum essas premissas tácitas interconectadas — que a condição humana,…

Nessa semelhança entre membros, ou seja, entre órgãos motores externos e ferramentas, encontramos o motivo de os primeiros — e, por extensão, de todas as estruturas funcionais auxiliares do corpo, as internas não menos que as externas, as sensórias e químicas não menos que as motoras serem chamados de “órgãos”, o que significa exatamente “ferramentas”:…

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 of one great branch of natural science: biology. Are we, perhaps, on the verge of another…

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 considering. We need not deal with them here, except for saying that they determined the first…

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 mature science into technology, and thereby the rise of modern, science-infused technology itself, happened in the…

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 conditions and factors. The powers that produce those things are powerless to impart a sanction to…

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, nuclear forces, molecular structure. Though a far cry from the simplification of the original “matter and…

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 the time-honored principle of causality per se, but the conception of change. We must now add…

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. There recurred in our account one term which is obviously crucial but is not a geometrical…

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 does stop moving when no longer pulled or pushed; and the pulling or pushing, when done…

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 construction, how the macrocosmos “looks” and what motions its bodies describe, but not why they do…

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 dimension in depth. We cannot go here into the manifold aspects of the crisis that attended…

Tomemos do passado aquelas características do agir humano significativas para uma comparação com o estado atual de coisas. 1. Todo o trato com o mundo extra-humano, isto é, todo o domínio da techne (habilidade) era — à exceção da medicina — eticamente neutro, considerando-se tanto o objeto quanto o sujeito de tal agir: do ponto…

I We live in a revolution — we of the West — and have been living in one for several centuries. We are naming its central agency when we call it the scientific-technological revolution. Having begun as a “provincially” European event, it has by now become global. In its progress it reshapes the external conditions…

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…

Tomemos do passado aquelas características do agir humano significativas para uma comparação com o estado atual de coisas. 1. Todo o trato com o mundo extra-humano, isto é, todo o domínio da techne (habilidade) era — à exceção da medicina — eticamente neutro, considerando-se tanto o objeto quanto o sujeito de tal agir: do ponto…

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…

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…