California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2020 Oct 27;42(4):52. doi: 10.1007/s40656-020-00343-w.
The theories of reproduction that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century exhibited a range in experimental thinking about concepts of gender and sexuality. This essay focuses on the work of a writer who proposed an unusual alternative to polarity-based ideas of reproduction. Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) was a physicist and friend to the German Romantics and someone whose writing also shares many interests with German Naturphilosophie. The essay discusses how, inspired by ideas from the alchemical tradition, Ritter challenged conventional thinking about reproduction in two significant ways: by linking it to the idea of rotation, and by using the figure of the androgyne to understand reproductive models in terms of triads, rather than oppositional pairings. A further objective of this essay is to consider which aspects of the alchemical tradition proved the most useful for Ritter's experimental thinking and to show how he integrated them with reflections on contemporary scientific developments around 1800.
18 世纪末出现的生殖理论在关于性别和性的概念的实验思维方面表现出了一系列的变化。本文聚焦于一位作家的作品，他提出了一种对基于极性的生殖观念的不同寻常的替代方案。约翰·威廉·里特（Johann Wilhelm Ritter，1776-1810 年）是一位物理学家，也是德国浪漫主义者的朋友，他的作品也与德国自然哲学有许多共同的兴趣。本文探讨了里特如何受到炼金术传统思想的启发，以两种重要的方式挑战了传统的生殖观念：将生殖与旋转的概念联系起来，并使用两性同体的形象，根据三联体而不是对立的配对来理解生殖模型。本文的另一个目的是考虑炼金术传统的哪些方面对里特的实验思维最有用，并展示他如何将其与对 1800 年左右当代科学发展的反思相结合。
