We are glad to give notice of the release of the book Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy, edited by Luca Corti and Johannes-Georg Schülein (Springer, 2023).

From the publisher’s website:

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 resource for 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.

Table of contents:

Understanding Organic Life Between Philosophy and the Natural Sciences

Karen Koch, Organisms and Natural Ends in Kant’s Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment

Andrew Cooper, Kant and Biological Theory

Andrea Gambarotto, Auguste Nahas, Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence

Thomas Meyer, “Inadmissible Application”: Some Notes on Causality and Life in Hegel

Edgar Maraguat, Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics

Ralph Kaufmann, Christopher Yeomans, Hegel’s Theory of Space-Time (No, Not That Space-Time)

Understanding the Human Life-Form Between Nature, Spirit, and Society

G. Anthony Bruno, ‘All is Act, Movement, and Life’: Fichte’s Idealism as Immortalism

Philipp Weber, “True Life Is Only in Death.” On Rejecting Life and Nature in Romanticism (Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel)

Charlotte Alderwick, Schelling on the Nature of Freedom and the Freedom of Nature: The Role of the Naturphilosophie in the Freiheitsschrift

Kyla Bruff, The State as Second Nature in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism

Sebastian Rand, The Psychical Relation

Thimo Heisenberg, The Physical Body and Its Role in Hegel’s Mature Ethical Theory

Susanne Herrmann-Sinai, Second Nature and Self-Determination in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit

Christoph Schuringa, Gattungswesen and Universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German Idealism

Naturalism and the Bounds of Nature

Mario De Caro, The Third Antinomy in the Age of Naturalism

Daniel Whistler, Post-Bonnetian Naturalism