In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, whereby political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the ‘value-free ideal’ is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way, which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been dubbed the ‘new demarcation problem,’ has until recently received comparatively less attention from philosophers of science. In this paper, (...) I appeal to Rawls’s theory of justice (1971) on the basis of which I defend a Rawlsian solution to the new demarcation problem. As I argue, the Rawlsian solution places plausible constraints on which values ought to influence scientific inquiry, and, moreover, can be fruitfully applied to concrete cases to determine how the conflicting interests of stakeholders should be balanced. After considering and responding to the objection that Rawls’s theory of justice applies only to the “basic structure” of society, I compare the Rawlsian solution to some other approaches to the new demarcation problem, especially those that emphasize democratic criteria. (shrink)

What should sociologists make of nature? Pragmatism provides one possible answer to this question by centering the practical relations between humans and nonhuman nature. Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements offers perhaps the most ambitious effort to develop a pragmatist sociology of nature. The book’s polemical aim is to depose a family of theories that, Bargheer argues, dominate our way of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. This essay constructs an alternative, more accommodating critical encounter between competing theories. It begins (...) by simultaneously granting Bargheer’s positive theoretical contributions while entertaining several virtues of opposing theories of nature and culture that the book largely overlooks. The results include three challenges for a pragmatist sociology of nature: the problem of depth; the problem of breadth, and the problem of differentiation. I argue that this accommodating critical encounter may result in a smaller distance between pragmatism and other sociological theories of nature and culture, and opens to more opportunities for synthetic conversations, rather than pointing to unbridgeable chasms. (shrink)

Since the emergence of cosmetic surgery at the turn of the 20th century, individuals in the US and Europe have looked to cosmetic surgery not only as a way to enhance their appearance, but also as a way to minimize or eradicate physical signs that - they believe - mark them as `different', that is, other than the dominant, or another, more desirable, `racial' or `ethnic' group. In my article, I raise the question of how such ethnic cosmetic surgery might (...) differ from other types of cosmetic surgery (such as breast augmentations for `enhancing' femininity or face-lifts to eliminate signs of aging) and, more generally, whether ethnic cosmetic surgery raises different normative or ethical issues. After a brief foray into the history of cosmetic surgery and its connections with racial science, I turn to the current practice of ethnic cosmetic surgery, situating it in contemporary political controversies about race and beauty. I draw upon the case of Michael Jackson - arguably the best known recipient of this kind of cosmetic surgery - in order to analyze how cosmetic surgery for people of color or for the `ethnically marginalized' is framed in a discourse of `race' and the consequences this framing has for feminist thinking about embodiment and embodied identity. Finally, I return to the relative ease or unease that cosmetic surgery evokes among its critics. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, and (...) consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a persons identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes (...) gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

For over two centuries, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has been constructed and categorized in multiple ways. An unprecedented mélange of anatomical features and physiological functions, it long remained a systematic quandary. Nevertheless, since 1797, naturalists and biologists have pursued two recurring obsessions. Investigations into platypus reproduction and lactation have focused attention largely upon females of the species. Despite its apparent admixture of avian, reptilian and mammalian characters, the platypus was soon placed as a rudimentary mammal – primitive, naïve and harmless. (...) This article pursues a different taxonomic trajectory, concentrating on a specifically male anatomical development: the crural spur and venom gland on the hind legs. Once the defining characteristic of both the platypus and echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), by 1830 this sexed spur had been largely dismissed as inactive and irrelevant. For a creature regularly depicted as a biological outlier, the systematic and evolutionary implications of platypus poison have remained largely overlooked. In Australia, however, sporadic cases of ‘spiking’ led to consistent homologies being remarked between the platypus crural system and the venom glands of snakes. As with its reproductive reliance upon eggs, possession of an endogenous poison suggested significant reptilian affinities, yet the platypus has rarely been classed as an advanced reptile. Indeed, ongoing uncertainty regarding the biological purpose of the male’s spur has ostensibly posed a directional puzzle. As with so many of its traits, however, platypus poison has been consistently described as a redundant remnant, rather than an emergent feature indicating evolutionary advance. (shrink)

We argue that new meta-theoretically based applications of non-traditional perspectives of knowledge in science, and sport science, that highlights the question of ‘being woman’, and our understanding of woman as a social and biological being through sport, can enrich the general understanding of gender, identity, body and sport by developing and deepening a critical humanistic sport science perspective through athletes’ artistic reflections of their own athletic female body.

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

Scholars studying the history of heredity suggest that during the 19th-century biologists and anthropologists viewed characteristics as a collection of blended qualities passed on from the parents. Many argued that those characteristics could be very much affected by environmental circumstances, which scholars call the inheritance of acquired characteristics or "soft" heredity. According to these accounts, Gregor Mendel reconceived heredity - seeing distinct hereditary units that remain unchanged by the environment. This resulted in particular traits that breed true in succeeding generations, (...) or "hard" heredity. The author argues that polygenist anthropology (an argument that humanity consisted of many species) and anthropometry in general should be seen as a hardening of heredity. Using a debate between Philadelphia anthropologist and physician, Samuel G. Morton, and Charleston naturalist and reverend, John Bachman, as a springboard, the author contends that polygenist anthropologists hardened heredity by conceiving of durable traits that might reappear even after a race has been eliminated. Polygenists saw anthropometry (the measurement of humans) as one method of quantifying hereditary qualities. These statistical ranges were ostensibly characteristics that bred true and that defined racial groups. Further, Morton's interest in hybridity and racial mixing demonstrates that the polygenists focused as much on the transmission and recognition of "amalgamations" of characters as they did on racial categories themselves. The author suggests that seeing race science as the study of heritable, statistical characteristics rather than broad categories helps explain why "race" is such a persistent cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper describes, analyzes, and critiques the construction of separate “male” and “female” genomes in current human genome research. Comparative genomic work on human sex differences conceives of the sexes as like different species, with different genomes. I argue that this construct is empirically unsound, distortive to research, and ethically questionable. I propose a conceptual model of biological sex that clarifies the distinction between species and sexes as genetic classes. The dynamic interdependence of the sexes makes them “dyadic kinds” that (...) are not like species, which are “individual kinds.” The concept of sex as a “dyadic kind” may be fruitful as a remedy to the tendency to conceive of the sexes as distinct, binary classes in biological research on sex more generally. (shrink)

Feminist contributions to the science curricula in higher education constitute invaluable but often overlooked resources for truly effective communication about science. Here I share a sampling of feminist science studies and discuss the origins of this effort to create inclusive and less biased science curricula that serve all students and citizens. Challenges from scientists center on assumptions and values about the appropriate relationship between science and politics, while challenges from educators extend to assumptions about how science has been taught. Currently, (...) national and local curriculum transformation efforts are producing useful insights and materials. (shrink)

While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality studies, it is a curiously aspatial and atemporal concept. This paper seeks to re-embed it within space and time by situating its emergence within colonial and imperial histories. Based on this discussion, it ends with three lessons for contemporary work on gender and sexuality and a broader theorization of sex-gender-sexuality regimes beyond the heterosexual matrix.

This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients.1.

Anatomy texts are seen as authoritative sources for knowledge about natural sex differences. The concepts of a natural, biological sex and of a natural difference are, however, increasingly difficult to sustain. A growing number of scholars have pointed to the fact that `sex' as much as `gender' is a historical and social construction. This article examines how the multiple-edition anatomy textbook, Gray's Anatomy, has portrayed the sexed body and male/female differences during the course of its publication, 1858 to the present, (...) focusing on specific parts of the anatomy, namely the sex organs or `organs of generation', the pelvis, the skull and the brain. An analysis of textual descriptions and graphic illustrations reveals that the male body has been the stable norm or standard against which the female body has been compared and implicitly judged as underdeveloped, weak or faulty. Only rarely has the male body been compared with the female body. Reflecting long-standing views about sexual complementarity and natural differences between men and women, some comparisons emphasize the reproductive functioning of females or imply that females are intellectually inferior. It would appear that the discipline of anatomy has remained largely immune from broader public debates about sexual inequality and gender representations. (shrink)

In 1575, the Spanish physician Juan Huarte records his encounter with a ‘rude countrie fellow’ who made ‘very eloquent discourse’ after becoming frantic.1 Other brief historiae follow: another ‘fra...

This paper surveys three controversial new directions in research about the nature of science and briefly summarizes both the intellectual and sociological impact of this work. A bibliographic introduction to the major literature is provided and some fruitful directions for future research are proposed. Philosophers of science are also exhorted to perform 'community service' by correcting misunderstandings of the methods of science fostered by these new approaches.

This essay argues that the racialized geopolitics of the rhesus monkey trade conditioned the trajectory of tissue culture in polio research. Rhesus monkeys from north India were important experimental organisms in the American “war against polio” between the 1930s and 1950s. During this period, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis expended considerable effort to secure the nonhuman primate for researchers’ changing experimental agendas. The NFIP drew on transnational networks to export hundreds of thousands of rhesus monkeys from colonial and later (...) postcolonial India amid the geopolitical upheavals of World War II, the 1947 Partition, and the Cold War. In this essay, I trace how NFIP officials’ anxieties about the geopolitics of the monkey trade configured research imperatives in the war against polio. I show how their anxieties more specifically shaped investment in tissue culture techniques as a possible means of obviating dependence on the market in monkeys. I do so by offering a genealogy of the contingent convergence between the use of rhesus monkeys and HeLa cell cultures in the 1954 Salk vaccine trial evaluation. Through this genealogy, I emphasize the geopolitical dimensions of the search for the “right” experimental organisms, tissues, and cells for the “job” of scientific research. The technical transformation of polio research, I argue, relied on the convergence of disparate, racialized biomedical economies. (shrink)

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an (...) ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop ‘citizens’ for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of science has led to improvements in the practices and products of scientific knowledge-making, and in this way it exemplifies socially relevant philosophy of science. It has also yielded important insights and original research questions for philosophy. Feminist scholarship on science thus presents a worthy thought-model for considering how we might build a more socially relevant philosophy of science—the question posed by the editors of this special issue. In this analysis of the history, contributions, and challenges faced by (...) feminist philosophy of science, I argue that engaged case study work and interdisciplinarity have been central to the success of feminist philosophy of science in producing socially relevant scholarship, and that its future lies in the continued development of robust and dynamic philosophical frameworks for modeling social values in science. Feminist philosophers of science, however, have often encountered marginalization and persistent misunderstandings, challenges that must be addressed within the institutional and intellectual culture of American philosophy. (shrink)

Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide (...) an auto-ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority. (shrink)

Central in the analyses of women’s and gender studies within the history of education has been Rousseau’s (Emil oder Über die Erziehung, 12th edn. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 1762) educational novel Emile, especially Book 5, which deals with the education of Sophie, Emilie’s future spouse. Given the lasting interest in the person of Rousseau and his work, it is astonishing that there is a work by him, that has not been a focus of analysis in studies on the history of education, (...) namely, Rousseau’s Lettres élementaires sur la botanique. Linnaeus had early on espoused a classification bases on the sexuality of the plants. Their sexualizing plants was in keeping with the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, which had also put the new order of human sexual relations on the agenda. The following article focusses on the question what importance Rousseau’s letters on botany can be accorded in this controversy over the sexuality of the plants and the relations between the sexes. (shrink)

In his seminal essay “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism”, Richard Popkin argued that, when one looks more closely at some of the Enlightenment’s most important thinkers, one is c...

Medical anatomy is one of the key sites of the scientific production, reproduction and maintenance of sex and gender. Our Human Anatomies Project explores the construction, reconstruction and maintenance of difference in genital anatomies, focusing especially on the clitoris. This article focuses on representations of human genitalia in the form of cyberanatomies - video, CD-ROM and internetbased renderings of human bodies. In cyberspace as elsewhere, the biomedical expert remains the proper and dominant mediator between humans and their own bodies, despite (...) the democratization of knowledges supposedly possible through the Internet. Special attention is given to the specific sites of production and distribution of these different cyberanatomies. Through our review of the globalization of cyberanatomies, we have come to witness the very sedimentation of sex/gender/sexuality in new arenas of representations of human bodies. Western biomedical imperialism and globalization of a standardized (American) body are taken up as core theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

The state of nature is a fundamental concept of modern political philosophy. As such, it is particularly associated with Thomas Hobbes’ and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work. As the following article shows, the state of nature is not simply an auxiliary construction [Hilfskonstruktion] for a theory that aims to clarify the relation between the political order and its origins and normative principles. It is also a figure of thought that introduces colonial images into political philosophy. The following reading of Hobbes and Rousseau, (...) which also draws on image analysis, traces how their conceptions of the state of nature are constitutively linked to imaginations of the savage that emanate from contemporary colonial discourses. Moreover, by comparing the writings of Hobbes and Rousseau it becomes apparent that the colonial difference increasingly takes on a systematic relevance. This development further contains significant similarities with the changing use of gender differences in political philosophy. (shrink)

This article explores the association between racial thought and the idea of Europe in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by noting the complexities surrounding the word???race??? in this period, before considering whether???and on what grounds???contemporary race thinkers identify a???European race??? or???races???. This reveals important ambiguities and correlations between anatomical, genealogical and cultural understandings of human difference. The essay then discusses how some of these ideas find expression in British encyclopedias, histories and geographical books. In this way, it (...) shows how racial ideas are disseminated, not just in dedicated volumes on anatomy and biological classification, but also in general works which purport to summarize and transmit contemporary received knowledge. The article draws upon entries on???Europe??? in every British encyclopedia completed between 1771 and 1830, as well as named source texts for those articles, tracing how the word???Europe??? was used and what racial connotations it carried. Some entries imply that???European??? is either a separate race entirely, or a subcategory of a single human race. Others, however, reject the idea of a distinctive European people to identify competing racial groups in Europe. These complexities reveal increasing interest in the delineation of European identities, an interest which emerges partly from long-standing eighteenth-century debates about the categorization and comprehension of human difference. In addition, they show the diffusion of racial ideas in non-specialist media, foreshadowing the growing prominence of racial thought in the later nineteenth century. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes (...) gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

Feminist proposals for reforming scientific method often ask that political evaluations be introduced into the context of justification. How might this work in practice? Fausto‐Sterling's alternative conceptualization of biological sex is analyzed and criticized. We then use this case study to comment on recent work on the role of social values in science by Longino and Kitcher.

Introduces a series of articles which deals with the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science.; Introduces a series of articles which deals with the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science.

In this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or “rotifers,” emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

What does feminism have to do with nanotechnology? And how do mad scientists demonstrate the connections between the two? To explore this, I examine a case study of mad scientists in film, discussing first why mad scientist images arise and why nanotechnology, or the manipulation of matter on the atomic and molecular scales, may be particularly vulnerable to this kind of representation. National funding agencies are calling for the integration of ethics and societal implications into nanoscience and technology research and (...) the training of future scientists and engineers. This emphasis offers a powerful way to break down stereotypes about science and engineering that discourage the participation of some groups. (shrink)

The new mythology for which the German Romantic period called was not envisioned as antithetical to empiricism or experiential/experimental knowledge, but rather as emerging in dialogue with it to form a cultural foundation for such inquiry. Central to the mytho-scientific project were problematic theories of sexual division and generativity that established cultural baselines. This article examines the mythological investments of two influential thinkers of the period—Goethe and Schelling. It then analyzes Goethe’s unique merger of mythological approaches to sex and generation (...) with empirical observation in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It next traces Schelling’s expansion of Goethe’s theories of nature beyond their empirical justifications to develop a metaphysics of sexual differentiation. Finally, the article illuminates Goethe’s final reply to the sexual dynamics of Naturphilosophie at the end of his life, through the analysis of a single poem, “Finding Again,” in the collection God and World. Ultimately and in spite of its empirical commitments, Goethe’s more flexible view of sexual correlations would lose ground to the powerful metaphysical mythology of sexual opposition as both scientific and cultural bedrock. (shrink)