Around 1800, German romanticism developed a philosophy this study calls "Romantic organology." Scientific and philosophical notions of biological function and speculative thought converged to form the discourse that Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs - a metaphysics meant to theorize, and ultimately alter, the structure of a politically and scientifically destabilized world.

Leif Weatherby is assistant professor of German at New York University and author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. He is currently working on a manuscript about a strange encounter between cybernetics and German Idealism.