Susanne Lettow 
Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences [EPUB ebook] 

Focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this volume highlights the scientific and philosophical inquiry into heredity and reproduction and the consequences of these developing ideas on understandings of race and gender. Neither the life sciences nor philosophy had fixed disciplinary boundaries at this point in history. Kant, Hegel, and Schelling weighed in on these questions alongside scientists such as Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Karl Ernst von Baer. The essays in this volume chart the development of modern gender polarizations and a naturalized, scientific understanding of gender and race that absorbed and legitimized cultural assumptions about difference and hierarchy.

Tabla de materias

Introduction


Susanne Lettow



Part I. Reproduction and the Early Life Sciences



1. Generation, Genealogy, and Time: The Concept of Reproduction from
Histoire naturelle to
Naturphilosophie


Susanne Lettow



2. Organic Molecules, Parasites,
Urthiere: The Controversial Nature of Spermatic Animals, 1749–1841


Florence Vienne



3. The Scientific Construction of Gender and Generation in the German Late Enlightenment and in German Romantic
Naturphilosophie


Peter Hanns Reill



4.
Zeugungl Fortpflanzung: Distinctions of Medium in the Discourse on Generation around 1800


Jocelyn Holland



5. Treviranus’
Biology: Generation, Degeneration, and the Boundaries of Life


Joan Steigerwald




Part II. Articulations of Race and Gender



6. Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropology (1640–1850)


Renato G. Mazzolini



7. The Caucasian Slave Race: Beautiful Circassians and the Hybrid Origin of European Identity


Sara Figal



8. Analogy of Analogy: Animals and Slaves in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Defense of Women’s Rights


Penelope Deutscher



9. Reproducing Difference: Race and Heredity from a
longue durée Perspective


Staffan Müller-Wille



10. Heredity and Hybridity in the Natural History of Kant, Girtanner, and Schelling during the 1790s


Robert Bernasconi



11. Sexual Polarity in Schelling and Hegel


Alison Stone



About the Contributors

Index

Sobre el autor

Susanne Lettow teaches philosophy at the University of Paderborn, Germany.