Professor Asa Kasher, Ph.D., is the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Professor Emeritus of Professional Ethics and Philosophy of Practice, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University. He is also a Professor of Philosophy at Shalem College in Jerusalem, a member of the European Academy of Science and Humanities, and has held visiting positions in many universities, including UCLA, Oxford, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Calgary, Ghent and Torino.
Professor Kasher has written more than 250 papers and ethics documents as well as several books in various areas of philosophy, including: Military Ethics, a book that won the national prize for military literature. Among his other books are A Small Book on the Meaning of Life and Judaism and Idolatry. He is also the editor of Philosophia, the Philosophical Quarterly of Israel, published by Springer; and editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia Hebraica 2nd Edition (online). Professor Kasher recently edited four volumes of Ethics of War and Violence (Routledge), four volumes of Pragmatics (language use) (Routledge), and was co-editor of Models of God and other Kinds of Ultimate Reality (Springer).
Professor Kasher wrote the first Code of Ethics of the IDF; an IDF document on the "Military Ethics of Fighting Terror" (written together with Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, now retired); and an IDF document on "Ethics of Disengagement" (with Maj. Gen Eyal Ben Reuven, now retired), as well as codes of ethics for major divisions and units of the IDF. He has worked (with others) on the Code of Ethics of the Knesset, the parliament of Israel, in a committee appointed by the speaker of the Knesset, and (with others) on the Code of Ethics of the Ministers, in a committee appointed by the Prime Minister.
Professor Kasher has served as chair or member of numerous governmental and other public bodies, some by appointments of the Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, or Minister of Health. Among them: Committee of Minister Security; The National Council of Bioethics; Committee on the Dying Patient; and many others. He was a member of a three member team appointed by the Minister of Defense to set principles for negotiating release of abducted citizens, particularly ones in military uniform. Professor Kasher holds the rank of Major (res.) in the Department of Casualties.
For his contributions to Philosophy, he won the Prize of Israel, the highest national prize, in 2000.