Susanne Lettow

Biology, established around 1800 as the “science of life,” has developed in modernity as not only a specific scientific discipline but has also continually served as a kind of social knowledge. The proposed research project will start from and explore the thesis that the re-configuration of philosophy at the beginning of modernity is crucial for the status that biological knowledge gained in the modern order of knowledge. The research project focuses on the writings in Naturphilosophie by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

The technological revolutions of biological reproduction, food production and medicine are far-reaching processes with consequences, especially concerning gender relations, not yet to foresee. Susanne Lettow’s project centers on the question of how these processes are articulated in philosophical discourse.