Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was a German biologist and philosopher. He is most known for his experimental work on embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He is also credited with performing the first "cloning" attempt of an animal in the 1880s.

He proposed that the autonomy of life was based on what he called entelechy , a term borrowed from Aristotle's philosophy to indicate a life force which he conceived as "mind-like", that is; non-spatial, intensive, and qualitative rather than spatial, extensive, and quantitative. In 1919, he became a professor of Philosophy at Cologne University and after two years professor of Philosophy at Leipzign University. In 1933, he was employed as an emeritus under the Nazi administration but afterwards he became the first non-Jewish academic to be expelled, because of his pacifism and open hostility to Nazism. He was interested in parapsychology and published his studies on such phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis.