A COSA SERVE LA FILOSOFIA?

Fabio Fossa

In this essay I submit an hypothetical reading of the short notes concerning the practical use of philosophy which Hans Jonas wrote down at the end of the manuscript Of the causes and uses of philosophy. In order to do that, I focus the attention on Socratic Wisdom and Virtue first, where Jonas discussed Socrate’s ethics, and secondly on Jonas’s critique to Francis Bacon’s doctrine of science, which he sketched in Some philosophers’ views on the human relevance of knowledge and developed in later writings. My aim is to try and reconstruct Jonas’s ideas concerning the practical value of philosophy as the science of the image of man and to show how this may be relevant to our technological age.