Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences, livre 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.
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