D
djeter
Guest
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-05/images/LeonKass_JeffersonLecture.jpg
One of the achievements of George W. Bush was his appointment to the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005 of Leon Richard Kass.
Leon Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the “Great Books,” as an opponent of human cloning and euthanasia and as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research – none of which endeared him to the cultured despisers of faith and led to a highly controversial tenure as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as “an old-fashioned humanist: “A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical.” Kass is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Man alone constrains his appetites in the name of civility or holiness. We are, in other words, not only hungry bodies but hungry bodies with hungry souls — souls that yearn for the community of friends and for the sanctification of animal life, souls that adorn animal necessity with beauty and refinement and that elevate metabolic necessity in obedience to the transcendent.”
The best part of this essay about Kass by Eric Cohen is a reflection on Kass’ thoughts on human sexuality: “Man became human – rather **they **became human, ***man and woman together ***— when each saw through the eyes of the other the fact (and meaning) of their nakedness.”
Much more here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/09/02/leon-kass-the-god-seeking-animal/
regards
dj
One of the achievements of George W. Bush was his appointment to the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005 of Leon Richard Kass.
Leon Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the “Great Books,” as an opponent of human cloning and euthanasia and as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research – none of which endeared him to the cultured despisers of faith and led to a highly controversial tenure as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as “an old-fashioned humanist: “A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical.” Kass is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Man alone constrains his appetites in the name of civility or holiness. We are, in other words, not only hungry bodies but hungry bodies with hungry souls — souls that yearn for the community of friends and for the sanctification of animal life, souls that adorn animal necessity with beauty and refinement and that elevate metabolic necessity in obedience to the transcendent.”
The best part of this essay about Kass by Eric Cohen is a reflection on Kass’ thoughts on human sexuality: “Man became human – rather **they **became human, ***man and woman together ***— when each saw through the eyes of the other the fact (and meaning) of their nakedness.”
Much more here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/09/02/leon-kass-the-god-seeking-animal/
regards
dj