Hans Jonas

Matérias

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VI)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  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 term and not resolvable into purely geometrical, i.e., space-time, terms; the concept of "force." It lurks in the concepts of both acceleration and inertia. We may (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VII)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  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 that the altered conception of what constitutes a change, i.e., an effect, naturally reacted on the conception of what constitutes a cause. Now, "change" had been (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(VIII)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  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 and size of its snowballing effects, technological power propels us into goals of a type that was formerly the preserve of Utopias. To put it differently, technological power has (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VIII)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  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 motion" formula of Descartes, the more advanced scheme in all its enormously increased subtlety still adheres to the (…)