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Leon Richard Kass (born February 12, 1939) 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, life extension and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist,〔"Leon Kass," ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 2009.〕 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."〔"Discover">Leon Kass, (interviewed by Francis Wilkinson ), ''Discover'', February 2008.〕 Kass is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include ''Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs''; ''The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature''; ''Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics''; ''The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis''; and ''What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song''. ==Early life and education== Kass was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He described his family as "Yiddish speaking, secular, socialist."〔(''NOW with Bill Moyers''. Transcript. Bill Moyers Talks with Leon Kass. 7.25.03 | PBS )〕 Although his upbringing was not religious, it was moralist: "Morality, not Judaism, was the religion of our home, morality colored progressively pink with socialism, less on grounds of Marxist theory, more out of zeal for social justice and human dignity."〔Quoted in Harvey Flaumenhaft, "The Career of Leon Kass," ''Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy'' 20 (2003).〕 He would not begin to explore his religious heritage until later in his career Kass enrolled in the University of Chicago at age 15, graduating from the College with a degree in biology in 1958. The College was well known for its extensive core curriculum, and Kass studied the "great books" then prescribed by Chicago's core. "I became a devotee of liberal education . . . with a special fondness for the Greeks."〔 He graduated from the University of Chicago's medical school in 1962 and, following an internship in medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1967, working in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Konrad Bloch.〔"Kass, Leon R.," ''Current Biography'' (August 2002).〕 In 1961, Kass married the former Amy Apfel, a fellow graduate of the College of the University of Chicago. As instructors in the College in later years, they would frequently teach seminars together.〔Mary Ruth Yoe, "(Popping the Question: Is There Love at First Sight? )" University of Chicago Magazine 92, no. 4 (April 2000).〕 Their scholarly collaborations include several articles on marriage and courtship and a reader on the subject. They are now working on a new project, What So Proudly We Hail, that uses literature to examine the American soul. (The Kasses have two married daughters and four granddaughters; they reside in Chicago and Washington.) Leon and Amy Kass went to Holmes County, Mississippi, during the summer of 1965 to do civil rights work. Working with the Medical Community for Human Rights and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Kasses "lived with a farmer couple in the Mount Olive community, in a house with no telephone, hot water, or indoor toilet. They visited many families in the community, participated in their activities, and helped with voter registration and other efforts to encourage the people to organize themselves in defense of their rights." Later that fall, Kass wrote a letter to his family and friends detailing his and his wife's experiences and appealing to them to donate to the Civil Rights Movement.〔 The character of the rural, poor, and uneducated African Americans with whom they lived and worked contrasted with his colleagues at Harvard and other elite universities. It was this experience, he later said, that
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