Leon Kass, 1939 -

For his students and readers, Leon Kass has laid out a path of inquiry showing that those questions that bedevil us most today have been with us for countless generations, and have to do not with the latest modern excess, but with man’s unchanging nature, wants, needs, and potential. It is a path he pursues by expecting the best of those who travel it with him and those who have traveled it before, and so drawing the best out of both. And it is a path that opens with a question: How does man thrive?

— Yuval Levin

Biography

Leon Kass was born in 1939, on the twelfth of February, when we celebrate the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. A mere coincidence, of course, but an interesting one.
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Introduction

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and in the College at the University of Chicago and the Madden-Jewett Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He has been engaged for more than forty years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advances and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues.
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Featured Essays

Featured Video

On a recent episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol, Leon Kass discusses bioethics, natural science, the Bible, and “Athens and Jerusalem.”

Featured Commentary