Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism

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).

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.

• 1. Introduction: Posthumanism after KantEdgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif WeatherbyI) DISSECTING THE HUMAN BODY: EMBODIMENT, COGNITION, AND THE EARLY LIFE SCIENCES 2. Vertiginous Systems of the SoulJeffrey West Kirkwood, Binghamton University, USA3. Brain Matters in the German Enlightenment: Animal Cognition and Species Difference in Herder, Soemmerring, and GallPatrick Fortmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA4. Agency without Humans: Normativity and Path Dependence in the 19th-Century Life Sciences Christian J. Emden, Rice University, USA5. Embodied Phantasy: Johannes Müller and the 19th-Century Neurophysiological Foundations of Critical PosthumanismEdgar Landgraf, Bowling Green State University, USAII) WHO’S AFRAID OF IDEALISM? MATERIALISM, POSTHUMANISM, AND THE POST-KANTIAN LEGACY 6. Kant and PosthumanismCarsten Strathausen, University of Missouri, USA7. Intimations of the Posthuman: Kant's Natural BeautyPeter Gilgen, Cornell University, USA8. Farewell to Ontology: Hegel after HumanismLeif Weatherby, New York University, USA9. Steps to an Ecology of Geist: Hegel, Bateson, and the Spirit of PosthumanismJohn H. Smith, UC Irvine, USA10. Protecting Natural Beauty from Humanism's Violence: The Healing Effects of Alexander von Humboldt’s NaturgemäldeElizabeth Millán, DePaul University, USAIII) CYBORG ENLIGHTENMENT: BOUNDARIES OF THE (POST)HUMAN AROUND 1800 11. Posthumanist Thinking in the Work of Heinrich von KleistTim Mehigan, University of Queensland, Australia12. Positing the Robotic Self: From Fichte to Ex MachinaAlex Hogue, Coastal Carolina University, USA13. In Defense of Humanism: Envisioning a Posthuman Future and Its Critique in Goethe's FaustChristian P. Weber, Florida State University, USA13. Beyond Death: Posthuman Perspectives in Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s Macrobiotics Jocelyn Holland, California Institute of Technology, USA15. The Indifference of the InorganicGabriel Trop, University of North Carolina, USABibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex