Life, Organisms, and Human Nature New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy

This collection of essays investigates the notions of life, living organisms, and human nature in Classical German Philosophy from a historical and conceptual perspective. Its 19 chapters move from the peculiarities of organic life to the peculiarities of the distinctly human life form and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of naturalistic accounts of life. In light of the growing interest in nature within current philosophical debates, the book provides an overview of what the philosophical epoch of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Humboldt, the Romantics, Hegel, and others can contribute to our understanding of life today. The collection of essays represents a plurality of approaches that reflects the pluralism of the tradition itself – highlighting the liveliness and polyphonic nature of the issues at stake and the ways in which they were approached in post-Kantian thought.

In combining historical and philosophical investigation, the collection constitutes a unique resourcefor scholars and graduate students working in various areas related to the study of nature in philosophy, contemporary theories of science, and the humanities more generally. 

Introduction: Life, Organisms, and Human Nature: New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy.- I. UNDERSTANDING ORGANIC LIFE BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND THE NATURAL SCIENCES.- 1. Organisms and Natural Ends in Kant’s Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment.- 2.  Kant and Biological Theory.- 3. Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence.- 4. Inadmissible Application: Some Notes on Causality and Life in Hegel.- 5. Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics.- 6.  Hegel’s Theory of Space-Time (No, not that space-time).- II. UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN LIFE-FORM BETWEEN NATURE, SPIRIT, AND SOCIETY.- 7. ‘All is Act.’ Fichte’s Idealism as Immortalism.- 8. ‘True life is only in Death.’ On Rejecting Life and Nature in Romanticism (Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel).- 9. Schelling on the Nature of Freedom and the Freedom of Nature. The roleof the Naturphilosophie in the Freiheitsschrift.- 10. The State as Second Nature in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism.- 11. The Psychical Relation.- 12.  The Physical Body and Its Role in Hegel’s Mature Ethical Theory.- 13. Second Nature and Self-Determination in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit.- 14. Gattungswesen and Universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German idealism.- III. NATURALISM AND THE BOUNDS OF NATURE.- 15.  The Third Antinomy in the Age of Naturalism.- 16. Post-Bonnetian Naturalism.- 17. Romantic Empiricism in the Anthropocene: Unlocking A. v. Humboldt’s and F. W. J. Schelling’s Potential for the Environmental Humanities.- 18. Nature’s System Within the System: Hegel’s Idealist Philosophy of Nature.- 19. Scientism as Ideology; Speculative Naturalism as Qualified Decoloniality.

Luca Corti is Assistant Professor at the University of Padua as well as Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Padua, the University of Chicago, and the University Paris I Sorbonne. His research focuses on German Idealism (especially Kant and Hegel), philosophy of nature and organism as well as contemporary analytical philosophy. He has published two books and several articles on these topics. He is co-editor of Sellars and The History of Modern Philosophy (Routledge 2018) and Normativity and the Life Sciences: Analytical and Continental Perspectives (HPLS, 2021). He is PI of the German-Italian  DAAD project  “Rethinking Nature”, the Italian National Project (PRIN) “Understanding Natural History: Nature, Evolution and Human Beings” as well as of the DFG research network on “Classical German Anthropologies” .

Johannes-Georg Schülein is Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Philosophy Department and the ResearchCenter for Classical German Philosophy / Hegel Archive at the University of Bochum, Germany. His research focusses on Classical German Philosophy and its contemporary appeal. He is the author of the book Metaphysik und ihre Kritik bei Hegel und Derrida (Meiner, 2016) and of several articles on Hegel, Kant, Schelling, and Spinoza. He is the managing editor of the international journal Hegel-Studien and PI of the German-Italian research project “Rethinking Nature” as well as of the DFG research network “Classical German Anthropologies”.