Edgar Landgraf is Professor of German 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 and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the 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 Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (2016).
It is very reassuring to see that the emerging paradigm of posthumanism and the posthuman is beginning to receive some solid critical, historical and genealogical contextualisation. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and Life Sciences after Kant is a very welcome extension of the idea of posthumanist prefiguration into the Enlightenment, German Idealism and Romanticism. The contributions to this important collection make an excellent case for locating the beginnings of a critique of anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, mind-body dualism, unified self and free will within 18th- and 19th-century humanist thought. In doing so, they succeed in painting a more complex, less fashionable, more nuanced and thus more powerful picture of the posthumanist paradigm, while also providing an overdue critical reassessment of German Enlightenment and Romantic thought and their continued influence. The individual contributions take their readers on a fascinating journey through the beginnings of modern life and cognitive sciences, the aesthetic and politics of Romanticism and show how figures like Kant, Herder, Hegel, Humboldt, Kleist, Fichte, Goethe and many others already prepare the terrain for current revisions of materialism, the redefinition of the boundaries between human and nonhuman, the questioning of the role of agency and technology, as well as the rethinking of ecology. * Stefan Herbrechter, Research Fellow, Coventry University, UK *