Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven gave an invited paper, "Hans Jonas and Spinoza on the Philosophy of Organism," at the conference, Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas, at Arizona State University, Tempe, in November. The conference gathered experts on the philosophy and theology of Hans Jonas from all over the world for two days.
Jonas was the first philosopher to realize that Spinoza's ethics is a theory of organism, a position which has gained followers in the last decade. Jonas was inspired by Spinoza's attempt to rethink the human person as part of nature and Jonas developed his own version of naturalism that culminated in a moral imperative to protect and save the natural world.
