Overview

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the “human.” This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism’s most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called “humanists” of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dr. Edgar Landgraf (Bowling Green State University, USA) ,  Prof Gabriel Trop (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) ,  Prof Leif Weatherby (New York University, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Weight:   0.553kg
ISBN:  

9781501335679

ISBN 10:   1501335677
Pages:   352
Publication Date:   04 October 2018
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Posthumanism after Kant Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby I) DISSECTING THE HUMAN BODY: EMBODIMENT, COGNITION, AND THE EARLY LIFE SCIENCES 2. Vertiginous Systems of the Soul Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Binghamton University, USA 3. Brain Matters in the German Enlightenment: Animal Cognition and Species Difference in Herder, Soemmerring, and Gall Patrick Fortmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA 4. Agency without Humans: Normativity and Path Dependence in the 19th-Century Life Sciences Christian J. Emden, Rice University, USA 5. Embodied Phantasy: Johannes Müller and the 19th-Century Neurophysiological Foundations of Critical Posthumanism Edgar Landgraf, Bowling Green State University, USA II) WHO’S AFRAID OF IDEALISM? MATERIALISM, POSTHUMANISM, AND THE POST-KANTIAN LEGACY 6. Kant and Posthumanism Carsten Strathausen, University of Missouri, USA 7. Intimations of the Posthuman: Kant's Natural Beauty Peter Gilgen, Cornell University, USA 8. Farewell to Ontology: Hegel after Humanism Leif Weatherby, New York University, USA 9. Steps to an Ecology of Geist: Hegel, Bateson, and the Spirit of Posthumanism John H. Smith, UC Irvine, USA 10. Protecting Natural Beauty from Humanism's Violence: The Healing Effects of Alexander von Humboldt’s Naturgemälde Elizabeth Millán, DePaul University, USA III) CYBORG ENLIGHTENMENT: BOUNDARIES OF THE (POST)HUMAN AROUND 1800 11. Posthumanist Thinking in the Work of Heinrich von Kleist Tim Mehigan, University of Queensland, Australia 12. Positing the Robotic Self: From Fichte to Ex Machina Alex Hogue, Coastal Carolina University, USA 13. In Defense of Humanism: Envisioning a Posthuman Future and Its Critique in Goethe's Faust Christian P. Weber, Florida State University, USA 13. Beyond Death: Posthuman Perspectives in Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s Macrobiotics Jocelyn Holland, California Institute of Technology, USA 15. The Indifference of the Inorganic Gabriel Trop, University of North Carolina, USA Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Reviews

It is very reassuring to see that the emerging paradigm of posthumanism and the posthuman is beginning to receive some solid critical, historical and genealogical contextualisation. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and Life Sciences after Kant is a very welcome extension of the idea of posthumanist prefiguration into the Enlightenment, German Idealism and Romanticism. The contributions to this important collection make an excellent case for locating the beginnings of a critique of anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, mind-body dualism, unified self and free will within 18th- and 19th-century humanist thought. In doing so, they succeed in painting a more complex, less fashionable, more nuanced and thus more powerful picture of the posthumanist paradigm, while also providing an overdue critical reassessment of German Enlightenment and Romantic thought and their continued influence. The individual contributions take their readers on a fascinating journey through the beginnings of modern life and cognitive sciences, the aesthetic and politics of Romanticism and show how figures like Kant, Herder, Hegel, Humboldt, Kleist, Fichte, Goethe and many others already prepare the terrain for current revisions of materialism, the redefinition of the boundaries between human and nonhuman, the questioning of the role of agency and technology, as well as the rethinking of ecology. * Stefan Herbrechter, Research Fellow, Coventry University, UK *

Author Information

Edgar Landgraf is Professor of German at Bowling Green State University, USA. He is the author of Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2011). Gabriel Trop is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He is the author of Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century (2015). Leif Weatherby is Assistant Professor of German at New York University, USA. He is the author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (2016).

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