Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences After Kant

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.

Edgar Landgraf is Professor of German in the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages 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 & Slavic Languages and Literatures at 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 Organ: Romantic Organology from Leibniz to Marx (Fordham University Press, 2016).