| Summary: | This paper presents the philosopher Hans Jonas’s idea of an environmental ethics. Through an outline of the development of man’s relation to nature from Greek antiquity to the present it is argued that science and technology in modernity favour a relation of exploitation which is partly the cause of fatal climate changes. Through Jonas’s philosophical notion of an ontology of man as an alternative to classical dualism and by means of a turn to an ontological interpretation of Kant’s categorical imperative, it is argued that mankind has a responsibility to both coming generations and to the biosphere as a whole. Not only does this ontological shift from philosophy of mind to an ontology of man transcend dualism in philosophy, it throws a new critical light on the technological development and suggests a new way of considering man’s place in the cosmos.
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