Hans Jonas
German philosopherWikipedia
77
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9
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Search complete. 77 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Hans Jonas".
Oct 9, 2026
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Um, uh, would it have been different if she had a very strong family life? Yeah, it, it probably would have.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
I mean, but Heinrich Blücher, right, her, her second husband who, along with Heidegger and Jaspers, I would say, are the three most important pe- men in her lives, I mean, the fourth would be Hans Jonas.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Um, but, you know, these were all older men, right? Um, Blücher was also older.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Uh, and, and by the way, Kurt Blumenfeld, who was also about 20 years older than her, was another one of her close friend.
Earl FontenelleHOST
But what I think is most maybe interesting here is the idea of an imamology transmitted through an indwelling particle of light, which goes from imam to imam.
Earl FontenelleHOST
That notion of a divine spark in human form is a notion that we see in one or two Gnostic Christian movements, right? In fact, the sort of divine sparks trapped here in the world anthropology is maybe the signature Gnostic anthropology, at least in terms of Gnosticism as it's been reconstructed by people like Hans Jonas, who want to make it a kind of at least something like a coherent religious movement in late antiquity.
Earl FontenelleHOST
At any rate, it's not something we see in the Quran explicitly.
Earl FontenelleHOST
It's not something we see in Islam, speaking very generally, but it is something that we see in these guys, and then it's going to come back in Shiite thought more generally.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Yeah, Kurt Blumenfeld was the head of the German Jewish Zionist organization in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
Arendt met him through her friend Hans Jonas.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
She had actually... potentially met him when she was a baby, but that's neither here nor there.
Roger BerkowitzGUEST
And, you know, he was 20 or 30 years older than her, but became a mentor to her in very important ways.
Ian Marcus CorbinGUEST
And I lean on a couple of Haiger students in a book.
Ian Marcus CorbinGUEST
One is Hannah Arendt and then her classmate Hans Jonas.
Ian Marcus CorbinGUEST
And Jonas talks about the idea of nature being totally evacuated of all subjectivity.
Ian Marcus CorbinGUEST
And he says that this is a kind of cruel novelty in the past couple hundred years.
John VervaekeGUEST
I wanna make a connection first to, uh, to Frankfurt.
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, and this is a notion he actually uses, although I think you see equivalent notions in John Searle, um, and in Hans Jonas.
John VervaekeGUEST
Uh, Jonas talks about need- needful freedom, and John Searle talks about in a good argument, we're not ...
John VervaekeGUEST
We find the conclusion compelling, but we're not, it's not compulsive.
John VervaekeGUEST
Uh, like I said, Searle talks about reason seems to be a voluntary necessity.
John VervaekeGUEST
Uh, many people have talked about beauty as a kind of volunt- uh, a voluntary necessity.
John VervaekeGUEST
And as I said, Hans Jonas talks about something very similar at least when he talks about life itself as a needful freedom.
John VervaekeGUEST
The needful, there's a kind of necessity, but there's a freedom in there too.
John VervaekeGUEST
And what I think is going on there is, and we don't need to get into the mechanics, I want to make a connection first to to Frankfurt.
John VervaekeGUEST
And this is a notion he actually uses, although I think you see equivalent notions in John Searle and in Hans Jonas.
John VervaekeGUEST
Jonas talks about needful freedom, and John Searle talks about, in a good argument, we find the conclusion compelling, but it's not compulsive.
John VervaekeGUEST
There's this weird state.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
I, I, I think that, uh, that's true.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
Um, you know, Arendt, uh, you know, Arendt has published books of letters with the who's who of male thinkers of the 20th century, right? Jaspers, Heidegger, y- you know, um, Gershom Scholem, uh, Hans Jonas, um, Kurt Blumenfeld, um, many others.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
The only single volume published book of letters with a woman is Mary McCarthy.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
And now, part of this is a bias of the people who edit and publish these books.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
... disagree with you and still be your friend, or can you actually do it?" And, you know, um, I think people don't often think about this enough, which is, you know, here's a woman who of all the things she suffered, right, friends were the most important things to her, but most of her friends in the intellectual world were men, and they were very wealth- not wealthy, but powerful, articulate men.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
And when she said things they disagreed with, they often criticized her very harshly, and I think she came to see that in a gendered way.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
Um, you know, she said, you know, Hans Jonas, um, I have this longer section on, on her friendship with Hans Jonas, and, you know, Hans Jonas was her, probably her closest friend f- of, for her whole life, uh, I think.
Roger BerkowitzHOST
I mean, I'm just ...
Frater RCHOST
Stobaeus, 5th century, an anthropologist who copied out excerpts of the text, some of which only survived because he did, and that's why Litwa calls his technical Hermetica the Stobaean fragments, or the Stobaean Hermetica, often abbreviated as S.H., C-H, of course, is corpus hermeticum.
Frater RCHOST
Hans Jonas André Jean Festugier and Francis Yeats are the major 20th century scholars.
Frater RCHOST
Hanegraaff's epilogue is largely about how each of them reshaped these texts in their own image.
Frater RCHOST
Gnosis, saving knowledge, not knowing about something but being directly acquainted with it.
Andrea GambarottoGUEST
Um, and they say, well, Kant had this very good idea about teleology, about organisms being cause and effects of themselves, but then he couldn't bring the point home, so to speak.
Andrea GambarottoGUEST
Uh, so and what we can do, we have the theory of autopoiesis, and for them in that paper, Hans Jonas, the biophi- biophilosophy by Hans Jonas, who was a phenomenologist and a student of Heidegger, um, who essentially had this idea that, uh, organ-- this very famous quote that, uh, is used in the, in this literature that organisms are what they do.
Andrea GambarottoGUEST
There is this very important paper by Jonas in nineteen sixty-eight called The Biological Foundations of Individuality, which is really already putting this, this idea forward.
Andrea GambarottoGUEST
Um, of course, he was a philosopher, he was not a theoretical biologist, so this is only conceptual, but these people really take this, let's say, post-Kantian idea of teleology, and they try to formalize it in the form of constraints and closure.