Among the different interpretations of the philosophy of Schelling, there is no doubt that the ones developed by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers played a prominent role within the most recent Schelling scholarship. Both Heidegger and Jaspers focused on Schelling’s discourse on freedom, pointing out the fundamental incompatibility of its key elements, i.e. ‘ground’ and ‘existence’, as well as the fallacious conception of Seynsfuge that emerges from it. Moreover, Heidegger argues that Schelling’s ontology ultimately falls back into traditional metaphysical subjectivism, (...) ignoring the question of Being as such and in fact paving the way to nihilism. Similarly, Jaspers criticizes Schelling’s arbitrary account of the relation between freedom and existential being and his misleading conception of transcendence. However, I argue against Jaspers that Schelling’s discourse on freedom must be read as a philosophy of immanence, which aims at maintaining the concreteness of the concepts and at avoiding any form of transcendence. Consequently, I also argue against Heidegger that not only does Schelling’s discourse successfully show the compatibility of ground and existence, but that Schelling’s understanding of the ‘subject’ does not comply with Heidegger’s notion of ‘metaphysical subjectivism’ and is immune to Heidegger’s criticism. (shrink)

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss assumes central importance throughout Schelling’s oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810–11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here and (...) to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling’s best efforts to theorize it as ‘love’; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity’s foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling’s conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present, and the eschatological—as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity —not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves. (shrink)

My thesis reads Ernst Bloch’s materialist ontology with the aim of producing a utopian perspective on language’s materiality. As my Introduction outlines, set against the backdrop of a contemporary renewal in speculative philosophy, the present context is marked by a twofold limitation: (1) the perdurant marginalisation of Bloch’s form of utopian speculation, serving to couch contemporary materialism in thoroughly un-prospective tendencies; and (2), a relative failure of contemporary speculative philosophy to reflect on language, a failure attributable to the long drawn-out (...) dominance of post-structuralism’s linguistic form of relativism. To overcome these limitations I dedicate Chapter I of my thesis to expounding the core categories of Bloch’s materialism, casting a light on what I call its fundamental compositional structure: Incompleteness → Process → (possibility of an) Outfall, i.e. completion or arrival. In light of this, I argue that, placed within the horizon of Bloch’s materialism, incompleteness, process, and futural-directedness ought to be taken as cornerstones of language’s materiality. So as to better position what this means, in Chapter II a reading of the metaphysical Sens of Bloch’s materialism is given. There I consider Bloch’s materialism as a novel form of analogic metaphysics. Insofar as at the core of Bloch’s materialism there lies a metaphysical conception whereby being as such (e.g. Aristotle’s ontōs on) names an ultimate desire and not—pace the classical metaphysical tradition—an already existent beingness—a metaphysical conception Bloch proleptically terms the “ontology of not-yet being“—so then the essential dynamic of this materialism hinges on an incomplete analogy, for all things relate to that which is not-yet in existence; this not-yetness is the sustaining meaning of what is. In the final chapter I concretise my findings by turning to the question of language proper, reading “anacoluthon” as a speculative materialist figure of language which expressive this utopian analogic metaphysics. Anacoluthon denotes an interruption in syntactical flow (Greek: an-akóluthos, “not following“; German: Satzbruch, “sentence fracture/rupture“) and marginally features in Bloch’s corpus. But precisely because of its marginal status the figure possesses a real force in understanding language’s utopian materiality. Indeed, I read anacoluthia as expressive of the Blochian ontological composition. Anacoluthic discontinuities of speech are read as linguistic expressions of ontological incompleteness, ontological novelty, and ontological directedness to what is not yet. They linguistically express both the non-existence of ontological totality, but also, crucially, a real and open intending towards it: a utopian, creative, linguistically-based transgressiveness expressive of the world’s ontology. (shrink)

This paper ties together several anthropological and naturphilosophische themes in Hegel in order to re-examine the place of the philosophy of nature in the Encyclopedia. By taking Hegel’s anthropology as a starting point, I argue that his philosophy of nature has for its subject not nature “as such,” but nature as cognized by Geist, so that the identity of these two natures is only constructed by spirit itself retroactively. I trace the origin of this difference to the revolutionary event that (...) institutes Hegel’s anthropology – which is not a transition from nature to spirit, but a pure break or new beginning, culminating in the creation of the conceptual world of nature as “we” know it. As a result, the philosophy of nature does not precede, but follows from, the anthropology and the philosophy of spirit; the natural foundation is retroactively replaced by the philosopher with the anthropological one. (shrink)

Many contemporary scholars argue that Schelling’s version of intellectual intuition retains certain central features of the Kantian and Fichtean conceptions. One of the common claims is that, as with Kant and Fichte, Schelling’s intellectual intuition is the power of the subject’s productive understanding. However, we show that for the Schelling of the Identitätsphilosophie period, intellectual intuition is the power not of an understanding that intuits, or a productive intellect, but of a receptive and penetrating sensibility that understands.

Although it is clear in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift that he takes an agent's atemporal choice between good and evil to be central to understanding human freedom, there is no consensus in the literature and no adequate account of how to understand this choice. Further, the literature fails to render intelligible how existential freedom is possible in the light of this atemporal choice. I demonstrate that, despite their differences, the dominant accounts in the literature are all guilty of these failings and argue (...) that this is due to their misunderstanding of Schelling's conception of the relationship between essence and form. After outlining what I take Schelling's account of this relationship to be, I return to the Freiheitsschrift to demonstrate that with this account in mind we can make intelligible Schelling's claims about the agent's atemporal act, and the possibility of existential freedom on his account. (shrink)

This paper traces Schelling’s discussions of individuation from the 1799 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie to the 1802 dialogue, Bruno. It argues that the Erster Entwurf is unable to solve what Schelling there calls “the highest problem of the philosophy of nature,” because nature as pure productivity necessarily tends to annihilate all individuality. It is only in 1801 and 1802, the years that mark Schelling’s construction of an Identitätssystem, that a solution emerges. This solution is based on the rejection (...) of one of the defining orthodoxies of German Idealism, Spinoza’s dictum that omnis determinatio est negatio, and on the subsequent theorization of a form of infinite finitude. Consideration of Schelling’s changing attitude to the problem of individuation is intended as a case study of the more general shift from Naturphilosophie to Identitätssystem. (shrink)

Books in this list may be reviewed in later issues. ACAMPORA Christa Davis: Contesting Nietzsche pp. 259. £22.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-226-9239. ALTMAN Matthe...