Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was one of the most creative and original Jewish thinkers of the twentieth-century. This volume offers a retrospective of Jonas's life and works by bringing together historians of modern Germany, Judaica scholars, philosophers, bioethicists, and environmentalists to reflect on the meaning of his legacy today. From a historian of religions, who wrote a path-breaking monograph on Gnosticism, Jonas turned to the philosophy of nature, extending his existential philosophy and phenomenological analysis to include all forms of life. Unique among twentieth-century Jewish philosophers, Jonas argued for the possibility of a genuinely symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature, which he believed had been suppressed by modern technology. Jonas spoke against the human domination of nature on the basis of Jewish sources, especially the Bible and Lurianic Kabbalah, and he was among the first to define the ethical challenges that modern technology poses to humanity.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Ph.D. (1978) in Philosophy and Mysticism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is professor of History, Director of Jewish Studies, and Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism at Arizona State University. She has published extensively on Jewish intellecutal history, including Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being (Hebrew Union College Press, 2003).
Christian Wiese, Ph.D. (1997), is Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and taught at Erfurt University, in Montreal and Dublin, as well as at Dartmouth College. He has published extensively on modern Jewish history and thought, including Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Brill, 2005).