Hans Ionas's heuristic of life

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the philosophical system of the German-American philoso-pher Hans Jonas, known to the domestic reader for his work «The principle of responsibility. The Ethics Experi-ence for Technological Civilization» (1979). Particular attention is paid to the principle of the heuristic of fear as a kind of comparative futurology and philosophy of the organism. The main idea of the ontological axiology of Jonas is to recognize the immanent value of all organic life as a potentiality of freedom and morality. The relevance of addressing the declared topic is confirmed by the interest of Western philosophers and biologists in the works of Jonas. The novelty of the article is to refer to the works and ideas of the thinker unknown in Russia, devoted to the philosophy of the organism and the ethics of life, for example, the fundamental work «the Organism and free-dom», not translated into Russian. The main methods used are the author’s translation of texts and their critical analysis. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the heuristic of life, which is undertaken by the author for the first time. The heuristic of life can be of practical significance not only in studying the biography of a philosopher, but, above all, in analyzing the philosophical problems of biology and various aspects of applied ethics related to the phenomenon of life. In the future, the author plans to develop this idea with an appeal to more original sources and concepts of followers of Hans Jonas.

Keywords

• the heuristic of fear
• the heuristic of life
• life
• organism
• responsibility
• freedom
• ontological axiology