Last Friday, the colleagues of ETHU organised an event to celebrate the retirement as emeritus of our member Johan Stuy. Memories and appeciation of his longstanding carreer as an ethicist at our university were shared amicably!
Johan Stuy (1957) is full professor of ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of the VUB. He started his academic career at the VUB as an assistant to Professors Leopold Flam, Hubert Dethier and Maurice Weyembergh. From 1980 to 2021 he taught 'Reading of German Philosophical Texts'. His PhD dealt with the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen (1987).In 1990, following the retirement of Prof. Jacques Ruytinx, he was appointed as Lecturer for the courses Ethics, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, and Moral Philosophy, Faculty of Law and Criminology. He taught this course since the foundation of the Bachelor-Master program (2004) under the title Ethics. His research focuses on ethical theory, political philosophy and bioethics. During the past decade, Hans Jonas’s ethics of responsibility has been a central research theme.From the 1990s to the present, he was three times chairman of the department of philosophy and moral sciences, member of the research council VUB (1984-1993; 1996-1999), member of the FWO committees 'religious sciences and theology' (1996-2006) and 'international scientific contacts' (2006-2012), and chairman of the 'ethics committee humanities' (2018-2021). He was promoter and co-promoter of research projects on bioethics (ethical aspects of in vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnosis, oncogenetics, euthanasia, vegetarianism), political philosophy (Leo Strauss, Jean-Luc Nancy, Axel Honneth), and religious criticism and ethics (Sigmund Freud).Since the foundation of the Bachelor-Master program, he has taught four Bachelor courses and two courses in the Master of Moral Sciences and Humanistics (Ethics and Axiology, and Bioethics).He's a member of the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics.