Jennifer Mensch
Jennifer Mensch is a Kant specialist and intellectual historian whose research lies at the intersection of philosophy and science during the long eighteenth century. In addition to numerous essays on Kant and his contemporaries, she has published a monograph, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2013, 2015 pbk, 2019 reprint), an edited collection, Kant and the Feeling of Life: Beauty and Nature in the Critique of Judgment (SUNY Press, 2024), a co-edited Special Issue of the Lessing Yearbook, "Reading Forster, Reading Race: Philosophy, Politics, and Natural History in the German Enlightenment" (Wallstein, 2024), and is finalising work on a co-edited anthology of primary sources, Key Texts in the History and Philosophy of the German Life Sciences, 1745-1845: Generation, Heredity, Race (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her current research interests includes attention to 18th-century German philosophical reception histories of travel narratives, with a special focus on the role played by Georg Forster. Before moving to Western Sydney University in 2015, Jennifer Mensch spent ten years at the Pennsylvania State University where she taught philosophy and the history of science and medicine.
Address: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/persons/jennifer-mensch
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Books by Jennifer Mensch
One suggestion has been that this unity can be found by focusing on what Kant calls the “Lebensgefühl” or “feeling of life”. Although Kant makes use of this concept at key junctures in the Critique of Judgment, and indeed at points across his corpus, the significant role played by ‘life’ for Kant remains significantly understudied as an area of sustained investigation. This volume contributes to filling that gap, bringing together essays focused on Kant’s conception of life as a throughline for approaching his work, with readings aimed at identifying its connection to Kant’s discussions of the imagination, of our experience of beauty and of the sublime, our approach to the organism, and our understanding of politics and morality. Taken together, these essays serve as an occasion for discovering a keystone concept for understanding the connection and unity of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
Papers by Jennifer Mensch
This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).
One suggestion has been that this unity can be found by focusing on what Kant calls the “Lebensgefühl” or “feeling of life”. Although Kant makes use of this concept at key junctures in the Critique of Judgment, and indeed at points across his corpus, the significant role played by ‘life’ for Kant remains significantly understudied as an area of sustained investigation. This volume contributes to filling that gap, bringing together essays focused on Kant’s conception of life as a throughline for approaching his work, with readings aimed at identifying its connection to Kant’s discussions of the imagination, of our experience of beauty and of the sublime, our approach to the organism, and our understanding of politics and morality. Taken together, these essays serve as an occasion for discovering a keystone concept for understanding the connection and unity of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).
germs for understanding the complex metaphysics at work in both
Ficino’s reinterpretation of Greek philosophy for a Humanist
audience, and in Kant’s own efforts to describe the moral shaping
of humankind that he took to be the heart of the Enlightenment
project.
The focus for our discussions this semester will be on these sorts of literary projects appearing across the long eighteenth century, with special attention paid to the work done by female authors. Such works have had particularly interesting reception histories. Typically derided at publication as low-quality products by an inherently inferior class of writer (i.e., women), the pieces would in later years be lauded as texts produced by early feminists. In this vein, non-white protagonists were seen to be vehicles for veiled critiques of domestic politics, and a call thereby for the emancipation of women. And indeed, we will spend time in the middle of the semester looking at some of the more famous direct calls for women’s rights put forward by Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Amalia Holst. That said, feminists have in recent years pushed back against the lionization of many of these literary works, condemning them for ethnocentric bias if not outright racism. We will take a look at all of this throughout the semester, with each of the texts carefully paired with critical contemporary analyses alongside supporting background literature that can orient us as to the social and political context of both the author, and the site, upon which the action will unfold.
Participants List and Webpage: https://www.michael-olson.com/gsaseminar/
Summary: As even a quick glance at the list of “Neue Literatur zu Georg Forster” included at the end of each installment of the Georg-Forster-Studien will attest, scholarly work on Georg and his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, is being produced at a steady clip. The enduring fame of the Forsters begins with their time spent as naturalists on James Cook’s second major expedition to the Pacific in search of a southern continent (1772-75). The Forsters each published important accounts of the voyage, and continued for decades afterward as key disseminators—via translations, commentaries, articles, and books—of travel literature for German readers. For today’s historians of philosophy, however, Georg Forster is best-known for his dispute with Kant on race. But the Forsters’ ethnographic observations and natural historical writings were more broadly influential than this one exchange suggests, and their philosophical reception history remains significantly understudied overall. This seminar aims to begin recovering some of their impact on the philosophical anthropologies produced by Herder, Kant, and Meiners.