Students using Ritalin in preparation for their exams is a hotly debated issue, while meditating or drinking coffee before those same exams is deemed uncontroversial. However, taking Ritalin, meditating and drinking coffee or even education in general, can all be considered forms of cognitive enhancement. Although social acceptance might change in the future, it is interesting to examine the current reasons that are used to distinguish cases deemed problematic or unproblematic. Why are some forms of cognitive enhancement considered problematic, while (...) others are not? In this paper, we consider cognitive enhancement as the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind, using augmentation or improvements of our information-processing systems. We will analyse cognitive enhancement in an educational setting in order to clarify the fuzzy distinction between problematic and unproblematic forms of cognitive enhancement. We will show that the apparent distinction made by many people between problematic and unproblematic enhancement is not based on any fundamental difference between these two categories. (shrink)

This book’s goal is to give an intellectual context for the following manuscript. -/- Includes bibliographical references and an index. Pages 1-123. 1). Philosophy. 2). Metaphysics. 3). Philosophy, German. 4). Philosophy, German -- 18th century. 5). Philosophy, German and Greek Influences Metaphysics. I. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich -- 1770-1831 -- Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. II. Rosenzweig, Franz, -- 1886-1929. III. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, -- 1775-1854. IV. Hölderlin, Friedrich, -- 1770-1843. V. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-. [Translation from (...) German into English of the-- Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.]. -/- Note: the manuscript is in the handwriting of G.W.F. Hegel, but the actual authorship is disputed. No date is given. Franz Rosenzweig made up the title as it is known today. He published the text in 1917. At that time, F. Rosenzweig thought F.W.J. Schelling was the author. No one has read this book for errors. As always, any errors, mistakes or oversights etc. are mine alone. Given a couple more years, I could improve this book. This is a philosophical translation and not a philological translation. Martin Luther who did the famous early translation of the Bible into German wrote in a letter, “If anyone does not like my translation, they can ignore it… (September 15, 1530)”. There are no ‘correct’ translations. Some are just better than other translations. -/- The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism. The German title is: Das Älteste Systemprogramm Des Deutschen Idealismus. This title was made up by Franz Rosenzweig in 1917, when he first published the manuscript. He found the manuscript in the Royal Library in Berlin in 1913. The manuscript suggested date is around 1796 and was done by handwriting research. However, the manuscript is not dated. The Prussian State Library auctioned in March 1913 from the auction of the house Liepmannssohn in Berlin a single sheet on the front and back with Hegel's cursive handwriting. The manuscript was lost during WWII. But Dieter Henrich found it again in 1979 in the “Biblioteka Jagiellonska” in Krakow (Poland), where it is today. Address: Jagiellonian Library, Jagiellonian University, al. Mickiewicza 22, 30-059 Cracow, Poland. Later research suggests that manuscript had come from the estate of Hegel’s student Friedrich Christoph Förster (1791-1868). He was one of the editors of Hegel’s posthumous works and most likely had access to a number of Hegel’s manuscripts. This text actually being one of them. Hegel traveled around Bohemia with Marie and Friedrich Christoph Förster around the year 1820-21 (see Klaus Vieweg). -/- Philosophical mystery -- who is the author or authors of this text? -/- Take a plunge into the deep and cold waters. Maybe a quagmire or quandary, but decidedly interesting. This project is to contextualize an old handwritten manuscript which is about 225 years old. The actual author is a mystery. I offer my own assessment. You can make your own assessments. The mystery has continued to unfold since 1917. There is plenty to read. Otherwise, think about the authorship and read more of the German philosophers and authors from this period and enjoy the depth of thinking and philosophizing. On one hand, there is just the sheer fun in the puzzle of the authorship questions; and on the other hand, these are the alluring thoughts that lead to the nascent stage of German Idealism and our intellectual heritage. There is no end to the accolades for this group of philosophers. A heritage that we still hear in in our attempts to move forward into our future. -/- Do your own astute exegesis (ἐξήγησις) as all paths are still open. Let your thought take to the wings of what is called thinking with this text. Critical encounters (Auseinandersetzung, or a Gegenüberstellung) with at least: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) --- starts here! German Idealism. We are not going to study this situation endlessly, instead we make some broad strokes and provide you a general context. You are allowed to read between the lines too. Goal: to understand the overall affinity and differences between the intellectuals of this period in German history; and to come to grips with this demanding text within its large scholarly context in the last 100 years. There are no final answers. (shrink)

In the Freedom essay, Schelling charges that (1) idealism fails to grasp human freedom’s distinctiveness and that (2) this failure undermines idealism's attempt to refute pantheism, as exemplified by Spinoza. This raises two questions, which I will answer in turn: what, for Schelling, is distinctive of human freedom; and how does the idealists’ failure to grasp it render them unable to refute pantheism? To answer these questions, I will reconstruct Schelling’s argument that freedom has the distinctness of being the unconditioned (...) condition of the world’s intelligibility. My reconstruction will illustrate how Schelling’s notion of freedom as primal will grounds the alleged primacy of practical reason as Kant and Fichte conceive it. I will then consider three objections to Schelling’s argument. Throughout, I will develop the Schellingian idea that freedom is enacted in an unprethinkable decision that cannot be anticipated by any law or principle. (shrink)

Both Schelling and Husserl reveal that any attempt to ground objective cognition in subjectivity would encounter the problem of constitution of original experience. They also endorse similar solutions to this very problem. The constitution of original experience is depicted as passive synthesis, i. e., it is the pre-conscious activity of the original ‘I’ (Ur-Ich). However, unlike Schelling’s interpretation of passive synthesis, understood as a theory of quasi-conscious willing (Wollen), Husserl relocates passive synthesis in the transition from instinct to habituality. The (...) constitution of original experience, as well as the activity of the original ‘I’, uncovers the dynamic structure of Being. Owing to this, transcendental philosophy must become a transcendental ontology. (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...) of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

This paper argues that McDowell wrongly assumes that “terror”, Cavell’s reaction to the radical contingency of our shared modes of knowing or our “attunement”, expresses a skepticism that is antinomically bound to an equally unacceptable dogmatism because Cavell rather regards terror as a mood that reveals the “truth of skepticism”, namely, that there is no conclusive evidence for necessary attunement on pain of a category error, and that a precedent for McDowell’s misunderstanding is Hegel’s argument for necessary attunement in a (...) system of knowing, whose refutation Schelling holds it is the “merit of skepticism” to provide. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what he calls a “science of reason”, (...) which he says cannot prove the absolute’s existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility. (shrink)

Schelling's philosophy can be seen as perpetrating the philosophical fallacy known as the Myth of the Given, in that it takes rational activity to be affected by an experience which is not conceptually mediated. This is supported by Schelling's repeated claim that there is an experience which is indescribable, and which forces us to silence. In the first part of the paper it will be shown how different readings of Schelling result in this fallacy. In the second and third parts (...) an alternative reading will be developed which avoids the fallacy while still making room for unsayable experience. Finally, the proposed interpretation will enable us to interpret Schelling's claim that expressing the unsayable, conveying it to another, is possible after all. »The wish for intelligibility is a terrible one. It means that we are willing to reveal ourselves through the self 's betrayal of itself.« (Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. (shrink)

Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this from the “Letters,” which reject Fichte’s claim (...) that the Wissenschaftslehre is an unrivalled system. I read Schelling as charging Fichte with misrepresenting a system’s livability or commensurability with our finitude. My historical aim is to provide a framework for understanding Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, which argues that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness or limitation by our finitude. On my reading, Schelling is early and continually committed to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is often thought of as a “philosopher’s philosopher,” with a specialist rather than generalist appeal. One reason for Schelling’s lack of popularity is that he is something of a problem case for traditional narratives about the history of philosophy. Although he is often slotted in as a stepping stone on the intellectual journey from Kant to Hegel, any attention to his ideas will show that he does not fit this role very well. His later (...) philosophy suggests a materialism and empiricism that puts him outside of idealism proper; his connection with the romantic movement suggests an aestheticism that challenges traditional philosophy as such; and his mysticism allies him with medieval, pre-critical philosophies considered antiquated by the 19th century. And if Schelling was not entirely at home with his contemporaries, he seems, on the face of it, to have fared little better with his future: there has been no Schelling school, he has had no followers. No historical trajectory announces Schelling as its point of departure. -/- And yet Schelling’s influence has been an extraordinary one. He has inspired physicists, physicians, theologians, historians and poets. A wildly diverse set of philosophers have claimed that their ideas have resonance with his. Perhaps the question of Schelling’s influence can be approached by looking at what Kant says about works of genius -- that they should give rise to inspiration, not imitation. Paradoxically, to imitate genius is not to produce an imitation but a new creative work. Whether or not Schelling should be strictly viewed as a genius, Kant’s notion suggests a sense in which Schelling should be understood as a “philosopher’s philosopher”; he inspired creativity, not repetition. In this perspective, the lack of a “Schelling school” is a sign of strength; Schelling is continually being rediscovered, and his works have retained a fresh and untimely character. If Schelling does not have any obvious historical successors, it is because his influence cannot be charted by the usual methods. New philosophical tools are needed in order to understand his philosophical significance, his impact on contemporary thought and relevance for contemporary concerns. (shrink)

On 6 January 1795, the twenty-year-old Schelling—still a student at the Tübinger Stift—wrote to his friend and former roommate, Hegel: “Now I am working on an Ethics à la Spinoza. It is designed to establish the highest principles of all philosophy, in which theoretical and practical reason are united”. A month later, he announced in another letter to Hegel: “I have become a Spinozist! Don’t be astonished. You will soon hear how”. At this period in his philosophical development, Schelling had (...) been deeply under the spell of Fichte’s new philosophy and the Wissenschaftslehre. The text Schelling was writing at the time was the early Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, though his characterization of this text would much better fit the somewhat later work which is the focus of the current paper: Schelling’s 1801 Darstellung meines System der Philosophie (hereafter: Presentation). The Presentation is a text written more geometrico, following the style of Spinoza’s Ethics. While Spinoza’s influence and inspiration is stated explicitly and unmistakably in Schelling’s preface, the content of this composition might seem quite foreign to Spinoza’s philosophy, so much so, in fact, that Michael Vater—the astute translator and editor of the recent English translation of the text—has contended that “despite the formal similarities between Spinoza’s geometrical method and Schelling’s numbered mathematical-geometrical constructions, Schelling’s direct debts to Spinoza are few”. The Presentation is an extremely dense and difficult text, and while I agree that at first glance Schelling’s engagement with the concept of reason (Vernunft) and the identity formula ‘A=A’ seems to have little if anything to do with Spinoza (especially since Spinoza’s key terminology of ‘God’, ‘causa sui’, ‘substance’, ‘attribute’, and ‘mode’ is barely mentioned in the Presentation), I suspect that at a deeper level Schelling is attempting to transform Spinoza’s system by replacing God, Spinoza’s ultimate reality, with reason. Though this might at first seem bizarre, I believe it can be profitably motivated and explained upon further reflection. It is this transformation of Spinoza’s God into (the early) Schelling’s reason that is the primary subject of this study. I develop this paper in the following order. In the first part I provide a very brief overview of Schelling’s lifelong engagement with Spinoza’s philosophy, which will prepare us for my study of the 1801 Presentation. In the second part, I consider the formal structure and rhetoric of the Presentation against the background of Spinoza’s Ethics, and show how Schelling regularly imitates Spinoza’s tiniest rhetorical gestures. In the third and final part I turn to the opening of the Presentation, and argue that Schelling attempts there to distance himself from Fichte by developing a conception of reason as the absolute, or the identity of the subject and object, just as the thinking substance and the extended substance are identified in Spinoza’s God. (shrink)

Seeking to determine what it is that incites Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm during Schelling’s early lectures at Berlin, then what it is that thoroughly extinguishes his hope in months to follow, I establish: first, that the criticisms of Hegel in Schelling’s negative philosophy depend upon Kantian distinctions and reflect Kant’s critical methodology; secondly, that the leveling function Schelling assigns to these distinctions corresponds to the notion of irony as a destructive force found in The Concept of Irony; finally, that Kierkegaard will come (...) to concretize an account that adheres more closely to Kant’s transition from negative to positive than to Schelling’s. (shrink)

The post-Kantians were inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment to forge a new synthesis of natural philosophy, art and history that would overcome the dualisms and gulfs within Kant’s philosophy. Focusing on biology and showing how Schelling reworked and transformed Kant’s insights, it is argued that Schelling was largely successful in laying the foundations for this synthesis, although he was not always consistent in building on these foundations. To appreciate this achievement, it is argued that Schelling should not be interpreted (...) as an idealist but as a process metaphysician; as he claimed, overcoming the oppositions between idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism. It is also argued that as a process metaphysician, Schelling not merely defended an organic view of nature but developed a theory of emergence and a new conception of life relevant to current theoretical and philosophical biology. This interpretation provides a defense of process metaphysics as the logical successor to Kant’s critical philosophy and thereby as the most defensible tradition of philosophy up to the present. It provides the foundations for post-reductionist science, reconciling the sciences, the arts and the humanities, and provides the basis for a more satisfactory ethics and political philosophy. Most importantly, it overcomes the nihilism of European civilization, providing the foundations for a global ecological civilization. (shrink)

Searching for the origins of 20th century Philosophical Anthropology, it is quite common to follow the suggestions of A. Gehlen who points to Herder as such an origin. In this study, however, I propose a rather different, until now scarcely considered hypothesis: the origin of Philosophical Anthropology can be brought back to Schelling’s reflections concerning Kant’s Critique of Judgement and the problem of self-organization of nature. Starting from his critical observations on Kant, Schelling works out the concept of a succession (...) of levels in the organic, and that of the ex-centricity that defines human beings. Exactly these two concepts will be discussed by Scheler in The Human Place in the Cosmos and by Plessner in The Stages of the Organic and Man. It is commonly assumed that Schelling did not exert any direct influence upon Philosophical Anthropology; one usually allows only for an indirect influence on Scheler, intermediated by Eduard von Hartmann. This paper shows, however, that a documentable, direct influence of Schelling on Scheler can be demonstrated, and that it was decisive for the birth of Philosophical Anthropology. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

German idealism stems in large part from Fichte’s response to a dilemma involving the concepts of pantheism, freedom and time: either time is the form of the determination of modes of substance, as held by a pantheistic or ‘dogmatic’ person, or the form of acts generated by human freedom, as held by an idealistic person. Fichte solves the dilemma by refuting dogmatism and deducing time from idealism’s first principle. But his diagnosis is more portentous: by casting the lemmas in terms (...) of person-types, he unintentionally invites Schelling’s philosophical rethinking of personality. In his middle period, Schelling argues for the consistency of the concepts of pantheism, freedom and time, claiming that it depends on a ‘good’ as opposed to ‘evil’ personality. However, since on his view personality is an absolute or originally undecided capacity for good and evil, the trio’s consistency is entirely contingent. In §1, I trace Fichte’s resolution of the dilemma. In §§2-3, I reconstruct Schelling’s arguments for consistency from the Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter, texts written just a few years apart. In §4, I allay a Kantian worry that this consistency relies problematically on the liberty of indifference or Willkür. (shrink)

Review article on Philipp Höfele's book "Wollen und Lassen: Zur Ausdifferenzierung, Kritik und Rezeption des Willensparadigmas in der Philosophie Schellings" (Freiburg: Alber, 2019). The book demonstrates why Schelling is not an uncritical predecessor of Nietzsche and the will to power, as Heidegger alleges. Instead, Schelling displays an ambivalent attitude toward willing—affirming it in some forms, critiquing or rejecting it in others. Above all, Schelling’s thought on the will has many layers of complexity: it includes not only a variety of forms (...) of willing, but also “fringe phenomena” like non-willing or Gelassenheit that are ordinarily placed in opposition to will. Moreover, Schelling’s philosophy of will is distinctive in not conceiving willing and letting-be as either-or alternatives, as Heidegger tends to do. Especially in the late lectures, Schelling brings them together, showing how non-voluntary phenomena like Gelassenheit make an authentic willing possible. (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)

Schelling and Schopenhauer both operate in the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant, although both are critical of some of its developments. Schelling's interest in evil – which is at its most intense in his 1809 Freedom essay – stems from his belief that Kant's account of morality. In the Freedom essay Schelling links these theories with the traditional Christian conception of evil as a privation, and attempts by contrast to develop a concept of "radical" or "positive" evil that grounds (...) both our freedom and individual personality. Evil as folly is a corollary of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge. The distinguishing feature of the free-will defenses is that god is logically constrained to permit moral evil if God creates a world with moral freedom. It is consistent with such defenses that God is (in some sense) responsible for creating evil, but God's actions are all things considered justified. (shrink)

This collection is the first volume published by Cambridge University Press devoted exclusively to Schelling scholarship. It contains eleven essays on diverse topics in Schelling’s philosophy, covering the entirety of his philosophical development, but mostly focusing on writings up to 1815. A number of the contributors are well-established scholars best known for their work on other thinkers in German Idealism. The volume thus offers readings of Schelling that are especially sensitive to his relationship to other figures in classical German philosophy. (...) Perhaps the richest contribution in the volume is Manfred Frank’s essay on Schelling’s theory of identity, which covers the theory’s historical sources, its application to the mind-body problem, and Schelling’s disagreement with Hegel. In any case, the wide historical range of these essays and the diversity of their topics offer an excellent overview of Schelling’s philosophical development. (shrink)

This essay argues that Schelling's late transition from Negative to Positive Philosophy constitutes a pointed inversion of the path of systematic ascent mapped by Hegel for the first time in the Phenomenology's Preface, which itself establishes Hegel's development out of and beyond Schelling's early philosophy; that a key notion to inspire the Hegelian vision articulated in the Preface returns to cap off the critique implicit in Schelling's late inversion, where this notion emerges from their divergent readings of Aristotle's Metaphysics; and (...) finally, that while Hegel's theorization of the end of all philosophizing represents his innovative enlargement from within the framework he finds in Aristotle, Schelling's vision of this same end facilitates the crisis of reason which opens unto revelation, and so is akin to the vision which carries Aquinas beyond Aristotle, albeit in Schelling's post‐Spinozist mode of thought. (shrink)

The post-Kantians were inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment to forge a new synthesis of natural philosophy, art and history that would overcome the dualisms and gulfs within Kant’s philosophy. Focusing on biology and showing how Schelling reworked and transformed Kant’s insights, it is argued that Schelling was largely successful in laying the foundations for this synthesis, although he was not always consistent in building on these foundations. To appreciate this achievement, it is argued that Schelling should not be interpreted (...) as an idealist but as a process metaphysician; as he claimed, overcoming the oppositions between idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism. It is also argued that as a process metaphysician, Schelling not merely defended an organic view of nature but developed a theory of emergence and a new conception of life relevant to current theoretical and philosophical biology. This interpretation provides a defense of process metaphysics as the logical successor to Kant’s critical philosophy and thereby as the most defensible tradition of philosophy up to the present. It provides the foundations for post-reductionist science, reconciling the sciences, the arts and the humanities, and provides the basis for a more satisfactory ethics and political philosophy. Most importantly, it overcomes the nihilism of European civilization, providing the foundations for a global ecological civilization. (shrink)

The short cover-description of the present book tells that "Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) was one of the formative philosophers of German idealism, whose great service was in the areas of the philosophy of nature, art, and religion." Those having some familiarity with Schelling, and his influence on American philosophy, indirectly via Coleridge and Carlyle and more directly via Emerson and C. S. Peirce, will perhaps not be surprised to learn that German idealism itself looks somewhat different, understanding Schelling's differences (...) with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel; and while the work under review shows no awareness of the distant American influence of Schelling, or American developments in general (except perhaps in some citations of Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being), I will take the present opportunity to emphasize connections and possible connections to American philosophy, as allowed by the author's account of Schelling and some further citations. (shrink)

Despite F. W. J. Schelling’s relative exclusion from the ongoing German idealist renaissance in Anglophone scholarship, recent critical and historical engagement with idealist texts affords an unprecedented opportunity to discover the richness and value of his thinking. This volume provides a wide-ranging presentation of Schelling’s original contribution to and internal critique of the basic insights of German idealism, his role in shaping the course of post-Kantian thought, and his sensitivity and innovative responses to questions of lasting metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, (...) and theological importance. The contributing authors offer compelling reasons to regard Schelling as one of Kant’s most incisive interpreters, a pioneering philosopher of nature, a resolute philosopher of human finitude and freedom, a nuanced thinker of the bounds of logic and self-consciousness, and perhaps Hegel’s most effective critic. (shrink)

The philosophy of nature operates as one complete and systematic aspect of Schelling’s philosophy in the years 1797-1801 and as complement to Schelling’s transcendental philosophy at this time. The philosophy of nature comes with its own, naturalistic epistemology, according to which human natural productivity provides the basis for human access to nature’s own productive laws. On the basis of one’s natural productivity, one can consciously formulate principles which match nature’s own lawful principles. One refines these principles through a process of (...) experimentation, which relies on the human being’s naturalness in productivity. By making natural activity central to knowledge, Schelling takes seriously the naturalness of humans, without denying the dramatic shift that occurs when consciousness and rationality factor into experience. This epistemology can thus be fruitfully put in conversation with current philosophical discussions of mind and nature, in that it offers a naturalized account of mind which does not suffer from the typical weaknesses of a contemporary Kantian or Hegelian account. The paper thus concludes with a discussion of John McDowell’s Mind and World, and shows how Schelling’s philosophy can resolve some tensions in that work. (shrink)

Goethe und Schelling begannen ihre Zusammenarbeit mit intensiven optischen Experimenten. Schelling lernte von Goethe, dass sich viele Farbphänomene bipolar anordnen lassen und dass eine optische Symmetrie bzw. Dualität zwischen weißem Licht und schwarzem Schatten besteht. Goethe lernte von Schelling, dass man das Prinzip der Bipolarität als forschungsleitende Idee verstehen kann (als eine regulative Idee in Kants Sinn). In der optischen Forschung kommt man mit dieser Idee wesentlich weiter, als gemeinhin angenommen wird; ihr Potential ist bis heute nicht ausgeschöpft. Sie ist (...) u.a. deshalb in der Versenkung verschwunden, weil ihre Verfechter mit ihr unseriös über die Stränge schlugen – außerhalb der Optik. Wenn sich das hätte vermeiden lassen, wäre Goethes Farbenlehre von Physikern möglicherweise weniger feindselig aufgenommen worden. Pech für Goethe. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard is often considered to be one of the most vocal critics of German idealism. The present paper analyzes the philosophical similarity between Friedrich Schelling ’s early idealistic work and Kierkegaard ’s existential writings, endeavoring to display Schelling ’s epic 1809 publication Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom as a possible forerunner to Kierkegaard. This juxtaposition reveals concrete similarity that supports the thesis that Schelling ’s work could have been of great inspirational value for Kierkegaard, especially Kierkegaard (...) ’s core concepts such as freedom, morality and God. However, Schelling ’s early work is primarily appreciated as a philosophy of nature, and therefore fundamentally different from Kierkegaard ’s theistic-psychological writings. The present paper tentatively opposes this distinction, concluding that if Schelling really is a forerunner to Kierkegaard, then we ought to appreciate Kierkegaard ’s writings as conveying more than a theological message. The conclusion suggests that Kierkegaard ’s writings should be interpreted in a broader philosophical context, closer to the metaphysical idealism he is often assumed to resist. (shrink)

Scholars agree that Schelling’s critique of Hegel consists in charging reason with an inability to account for its own possibility. This is not an attack on reason’s project of constructing a logical system, but rather on the pretense of doing so with complete justification and so without presuppositions, as if it were obvious why there is a logical system or why there is anything meaningful at all. Scholars accordingly cite the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ as emblematic (...) of Schelling’s critique and the source of his claim against Hegel that reason is bounded by something other than itself. But what sort of claim is this? For what sort of argument could it be the conclusion? On these questions, the literature is lacking. I propose that the question ‘why something’ motivates Schelling to give a transcendental argument to the effect that past and future are a priori conditions of the possibility of reason. As I reconstruct it from the Weltalter, this argument construes the past as the pre-rational decision to construct a logical system, while the future represents the purpose that guides the construction of the same. Schelling’s claim against Hegel that reason is bounded by something other is thus the discovery of inescapable presuppositions that condition the possibility of reason as such. (shrink)

This excellent book focuses on a decisive moment in Schelling's philosophical development: his 1801 dispute with Eschenmayer shortly before publishing Presentation of My System, the inaugural text of his identity philosophy. Carl August Eschenmayer was a German physician whose Kant-inspired writings in the philosophy of nature greatly influenced Schelling, especially with respect to the doctrine of the potencies. As Berger and Whistler demonstrate, the 1801 controversy has significant implications for understanding the trajectory of German Idealism and its debates on methodology, (...) the meaning of identity, and the place of nature in philosophy. (shrink)

In the Freedom Essay, Schelling provides four different accounts of the copula, two of which are largely implicit. In this paper, I focus on the first of these accounts, which I call the "mediated account." I argue that this explanation of the copula articulates a fundamental ontological structure in Schelling's philosophy. In the first half of the paper, I analyze the structural features of the account, drawing on Schelling's more extensive treatment in the Ages of the World. In the second (...) half of the paper, I argue that Schelling's fundamental distinction between that-which-exists and the ground of existence exhibits the same structure as the mediated account of the copula. This has implications for understanding the enigmatic relationship of these two principles to the Ungrund. I conclude by briefly suggesting other applications of this fundamental structure in Schelling's philosophy. (shrink)

If a problem is the collision between a system and a fact, Spinozism and German idealism’s greatest problem is the corpse. Life’s end is problematic for the denial of death’s qualitative difference from life and the affirmation of nature’s infinite purposiveness. In particular, German idealism exemplifies immortalism – the view that life is the unconditioned condition of all experience, including death. If idealism cannot explain the corpse, death is not grounded on life, which invites mortalism – the view that death (...) is the unconditioned condition of experience. In “Philosophical Letters,” Schelling critiques idealism, arguing that death symbolizes the regulative ideal of a philosophical system’s derivation, our striving for which unifies our rational activity. I interpret Schelling’s critique as explaining how death puts philosophy into question, an idea he develops in the Freedom essay and Berlin lectures. Death is not a problem to be solved by a system, but represents philosophy’s highest yet unrealizable end. (shrink)

Schelling scholars face an uphill battle. His confinement to the smallest circles of ‘continental’ thought puts him at the margins of what today counts as philosophy. His eclipse by Fichte and Hegel and inheritance by better-read thinkers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger tend to reduce him to a historical footnote. And the sometimes obscure formulations he uses makes the otherwise difficult writings of fellow post-Kantians seem comparatively more accessible. For those seeking to widen these circles, see through this eclipse and elucidate (...) these formulations, a deeper internal challenge is to make sense of the appearance and disappearance of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s work. The term’s apotheosis is often attributed to the height of German idealism and especially to Schelling’s identity philosophy, outside which he subjects the term to a radical critique. The identity philosophy aims to cognize the absolute ground of the system of knowledge and the system of nature, for which cognition Schelling enlists intellectual intuition. While the identity philosophy falls between a Fichtean debut and a late attack on Hegel, it is difficult to determine its exact parameter. I propose that a necessary condition for doing so is to clarify the explanatory role of intellectual intuition—that is, the specific problem to which it is the intended solution—on which the identity philosophy depends. To this end, I will trace a nexus of problems that Schelling’s use of intellectual intuition is meant to solve. Doing so will not only help to delineate the identity philosophy, but show it to be continuous with Schelling’s earlier and later periods. In §1, I account for the nexus of the problems of grounding, freedom and meaning. These problems demand, respectively, a principle by which cognition forms a system rather than an aggregate, a principle by which a system of cognition is compatible with freedom rather than incompatible and a principle by which a system of freedom can show why there is meaning rather than none. In §2, I reconstruct Schelling’s argument in the identity philosophy for why intellectual intuition can resolve this nexus of problems and, in §3, his arguments during other periods of his thought for why it cannot. I conclude in §4 by suggesting why the identity philosophy is continuous with these periods. Beyond fulfilling the interpretive task of making sense of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s sprawling corpus, my aim is thus to contribute to a unified reading of the latter. (shrink)

German Philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger By Daniel Fidel Ferrer. -/- Includes bibliographical references. Index. 1. Ontology. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Philosophy, German. 4.Thought and thinking. 5. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. 6. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775-1854. 7. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 8. Philosophy, Asian. 9. Philosophy, Indic. 10. Philosophy, Modern -- 20th century. 11. Philosophy, Modern -- 19th century. 12. Practice (Philosophy). 13. Philosophy and civilization. 14. Postmodernism. 15. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 16. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. -- (...) 17. Nagarjuna, 2nd cent. I. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface (page 4). -/- 1). Heidegger and the Purpose of Kanťs Critique of Pure Reason (p. 5 to p. 29). 2). Martin Heidegger's Encounter Methodology: Kant (p. 31 to p. 44). 3). Metahistories of philosophy: Kant and Nietzsche (p. 45 to p. 63). 4). Martin Heidegger and Hegeľs Science of Logic (p. 64 to p. 79). 5). Heidegger and Purpose of Hegeľs Phenomenology of Spirit (p. 80 to p. 102). 6). Analysis of the "Preface" to Hegeľs Phenomenology of Spirit (p. 103 to p. 110). 7). Hegeľs Dialogue with Lesser Known Philosophers (p. 111 to p. 121). 8). Heidegger's Encounter with F.W.J. Schelling: The Questions of Evil and Freedom, and the end of Metaphysics (p. 123 to p. 135). 9). Martin Heidegger contra Nietzsche on the Greeks (p. 136 to p. 148). 10). Martin Heidegger and Nietzsche on Amor Fati (p. 149 to p. 156). (1 1). Martin Heidegger's ontotheological problems and Nägärjuna solutions: Heidegger's Presuppositions and Entanglements in Metaphysics (p. 157 to p. 165). Index (p. 166 to p. 235). (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to analyze the concept of ecstasy in F. W. J. Schelling's Erlangen Lectures. In particular, I intend to show how it constitutes a significant evolution with regard to the model of reminiscence and in particular that of Mitwissenschaft, as presented in the Weltalter. The essay focuses on three aspects of the notion of ecstasy: 1) its relation to temporality, 2) its relation to interiority, and 3) its noetic value and its moral dimension. In conclusion, (...) I will show how in Erlangen a movement of progressive de-historicization and de-theosophicization of ecstasy began, culminating in the Berliner Einleitung of 1842/43. (shrink)

In this essay, I give an analysis of the account of non-being in the Weltalter, focusing on the ways in which this account reflects Schelling’s new ontology of revelation. I begin by discussing the connection between non-being and the fundamental distinction between the principles in God. I then turn to the relationship of non-being to being in the Weltalter and show how a new meaning of being allows Schelling to distinguish non-being from nothing. The new meaning of being also makes (...) possible a distinction between essential non-being and de facto non-being; this distinction allows for the temporal sequence of revelation and the possibility of evil. I conclude by showing the implications of Schelling’s theory of non-being for his understanding of creation. (shrink)

Das Problem der zeitlichen Konstitution ist für das Verständnis der genetischen Gründe der Subjektivität ganz wesentlich. Die zeitliche Konstitution selbst geht jedoch bereits über die Grenze des gegenständlichen Bewusstseins in das dunkle Vorbewusstsein hinaus. In den C-Manuskripten (1929-1934) lokalisiert Husserl die zeitliche Konstitution auf eine angemessene Weise im Bereich des Vorbewusstseins, aber seine Argumentation, sie als das anonyme Phänomen der „lebendigen Gegenwart“ zu interpretieren, ist nicht überzeugend genug. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag soll darauf hingewiesen werden, dass Schelling im System des (...) transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) eine alternative Lösungsmöglichkeit – nämlich eine Theorie des Selbstgefühls – anbietet. Das Selbstgefühl wird sowohl als prä-reflexives als auch als nichtgegenständliches Phänomen dargestellt, das sich wesentlich von gewöhnlichen Gefühlen unterscheidet. Selbstgefühl zeigt einen spezifischen vorbewussten Prototyp des Selbstbewusstseins an, nämlich eine passive Synthesis, die in der Lage ist, die Verbindung zwischen dem vorzeitlich-transzendentalen Vorbewusstsein und dem zeitlich-empirischen Bewusstsein herzustellen und dadurch die zeitliche Konstitution zu ermöglichen. Es wirft auch ein neues Licht auf das Verständnis der Vorbewusstseinsstruktur, indem es die vorbewusste Ich-Tätigkeit als eine passive Genesis der transzendentalen Subjektivität erkennt. (shrink)

This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance—indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of ground through Schelling's treatise, this book provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking (...) the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. This analysis shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation—including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to examine recent contributions to Schelling research that appeared in three miscellanies in 2020. Their common thread is Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which, because of its dynamic and processual characteristics, is considered relevant in the debate on realism, philosophy of biology and environmental ethics. In the historical-philosophical field, many contributions highlight Schelling’s debt to Kant and Spinoza and his close relationship with the Romantic movement. Lastly, the essay analyses contributions concerning the Spätphilosophie, showing how (...) Schelling’s philosophy is to be considered first and foremost as historical philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the concept of ecstasy (Ekstase), which Schelling elaborates on starting from the Erlanger Vorträge, is his response to Hegel’s famous «shot from a pistol». With this concept, Schelling overcomes the notion of «intellectual intuition», which was at the core of Hegel’s critics, and can now conceive the preeminence of existence (in the sense of Freudigkeit der Existenz) over Being (Sein). Thus, the theory of ecstasy puts Schelling beyond German Idealism and, under some aspects, allows (...) for a post-Heideggerian reading of his philosophy. (shrink)

At first glance, Schopenhauer’s account of human freedom looks strikingly similar to Schelling’s account of formal freedom in the Freiheitsschrift. Despite the clear similarities, I argue that there is a decisive difference between the two accounts—a difference that has to do with the ultimate grounding of freedom. For Schelling, the intelligible deed is a radical self-grounding of the eternal essence of the human being. For Schopenhauer, the eternal essence of the human being is groundless. Moreover, I argue that this difference (...) has decisive consequences for two sets of issues. On the one hand, Schelling’s concept of self-grounding allows him to preserve the universal application of the principle of ground. On the other hand, self-grounding is the only way that human beings can be responsible for who they are. Schelling thus anticipates a key insight of Galen Strawson: ultimate moral responsibility is only possible for a causa sui. (shrink)

The main theory at the core of this monograph is that the person is an entity ontologically new, since she is able to perform an act of self-transcendence, which is meant as her critical distancing from her own “self”, understood as subject of social recognition (Anerkennung), in order to open to the encounter with the world (Weltoffenheit). This allows us to consider a person in a new way, different both from confessional interpretations that see her only as a center of (...) the spirit and from reductivistic views. Schelling examines the act of self-transcendence through the concept of ecstasy, whereas Scheler associates it with the phenomenological reduction. The act of self-transcendence, that Schelling sees as originated by the “hunger of being”, is at the roots of the formation process of a person (Bildung): the person takes her shape by exiting from her own self-referential dimension and encountering otherness. If considered from this viewpoint, Plato’s “epimeleia heautou” exceeds an intimistic perspective: the “care” is no more a solipsistic self-care, but rather becomes the care through which the person transcends her own self to open to the relationships with otherness. It turns, therefore, into a care for world-openness (care for Weltoffenheit). The transformation of the individual and of society so becomes the double-faced aspect of the same process. The development of this set of problems occurs through a dialogue with Schelling’s and Scheler’s positions, but it is also supported by a historical-philosophical investigation, that for instance provides evidence of the influences of Schelling’s Berlin period on Scheler’s last theories and on the philosophical anthropology of the 20th century. Schelling was the first to conceive the concept of “eccentricity” in an anthropological sense, since until then the term had been confined to Kepler’s astronomy. Consequently, the planets’ elliptic (eccentric) movement heightens to an emblematic metaphor of human nature and freedom. The monograph also examines a possible convergence between Plato’s epimeleia heautou and Scheler’s phenomenological reduction. The book ends with a chapter on the topic of Vorbild. The exemplary testimony, that is Vorbild, becomes witnessing evidence immune from any pedagogical-moralistic intent: in fact, if it should relapse into the rhetoric of the “wish to give a good example”, it would immediately conform to the opposite logic of the model. A model is universal in so far as it makes everyone more like the others, nullifying the diversity, whereas exemplariness is universal in so far as it makes everyone more unique and motivates each one to follow her own characteristic path of existential trans-formation. Exemplarity doesn’t convey any contents, but rather encourages a kind of solidaristic involvement. Yet there are also negative exemplarities (Gegenbild) that place obstacles in the formation and block the existence of the personal center. (shrink)

While some process philosophers have denigrated the emergent theory of mind, what they have denigrated has been ‘materialist’ theories of emergence. My contention is that one of the most important reasons for embracing process philosophy is that it is required to make intelligible the emergence of consciousness. There is evidence that this was a central concern of Whitehead. However, Whitehead acknowledged that his metaphysics was deficient in this regard. In this paper I will argue that to fully understand the emergent (...) theory of mind and its relation to process philosophy it is necessary to recast the whole history of modern philosophy in terms of efforts by philosophers grappling with the relationship between mind and body, or more broadly, consciousness and nature. This will involve granting a central place to Schelling’s philosophy, the ideas that influenced it and how Schelling’s insights were developed by subsequent philosophers. Process philosophy will then be seen as the tradition generated by efforts to transcend the opposition between idealism and materialism, and its promise in this regard, apart from anything else, is what makes it the most promising philosophy for the future. (shrink)

Between Schelling’s Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung (1803) and the Dantean drafts of die Weltalter (1811-1815) stand the transitional texts of his middle period, the Philosophie und Religion (1804) and Freiheitsschrift (1809). His short essay on Dante contrasts an ancient conception of the closed cosmos with the modern universe as dynamic and expanding, then claims to extract from the Divine Comedy its eternal, threefold form. This article considers these schemata as they relate to the Philosophie und Religion and the Freiheitsschrift, (...) disclosing an enduring Dantean influence which first predicts, then persists throughout this stage of Schelling’s philosophical development. (shrink)

The present investigation brings into view the philosophy of nature of German Idealism, a philosophical movement which emerged around the beginning of the nineteenth century. German Idealism appro- priated certain motivations of the Kantian philosophy and developed them further in a "speculative" manner (Engelhardt 1972, 1976, 2002). This powerful philosophical movement, associated above all with the names of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel - and moreover having nothing whatsoever to do with the "subjective idealism" of George Berkeley - was replaced by (...) philosophical positions designated roughly as metaphysics of the will, Marxism, life-philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism, as well as positivism, empiricism, philosophy of science, the linguistic turn, and analytic philosophy. These philosophical positions more or less still shape us today. German Idealism amounts to a virtual intellectual-historical antithesis to these movements and thus presents itself in retrospect as a striking alternative. The basis of Idealism - in its various respective forms - is the ideal <Ideelle>, and thus the opposite of that which is real. It continually takes as its task explaining the real in terms of the ideal, and this is especially true of the Idealists' philosophy of nature.' Is this a hopeless undertaking? Does Idealism not lack an empirical basis? Can one secure any solid ground whatsoever in the ether of the ideal? In what follows, I explain how, more than anyone else, Schelling and Hegel sought to handle this problem and to cope with it. By way of anticipation, a clear preference for the Hegelian philosophy of nature will emerge in what follows, a preference which may come as some surprise considering how much controversy has surrounded the significance of that view. The project of renewing a thoroughgoing philosophy of nature can meaningfully begin here. (shrink)

The life and ideas of F. W. J. Schelling are often overlooked in favor of the more familiar Kant, Fichte, or Hegel. What these three lack, however, is Schelling’s evolving view of philosophy. Where others saw the possibility for a single, unflinching system of thought, Schelling was unafraid to question the foundations of his own ideas. In this book, Bruce Matthews argues that the organic view of philosophy is the fundamental idea behind Schelling’s thought. Focusing in particular on Schelling’s early (...) writings, especially on Plato and Kant, Matthews explores Schelling’s idea that any philosophical system must be perspectival and formed by each individual student of philosophy, providing a unique new understanding of an important and often-overlooked figure in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

An important study that brings together the results of more than 30 years of work on Schelling and Pareyson by one of Italy's leading experts.

"The ultimate end goal of the finite I and the not-I, i.e., the end goal of the world," writes Schelling in Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy (1795), "is its annihilation as a world, i.e., as the exemplification of finitude." In this paper, I explicate this statement and its theoretical stakes through a comprehensive re-reading of Schelling's 1795 writings: Of the I and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, written later in the same year, in relation to what (...) Schelling proclaims to be the central problem of all philosophy: the existence of the world (Dasein der Welt). To that end, I analyze Schelling's 1795 conceptions of synthesis and morality, and the structure of the I's striving in the world that they serve to create and uphold – a structure in which the I is torn between a paradisal past and a striven-for future that it constitutively cannot reach as long as the world is there. Schelling's 1795 metaphysics is ultimately caught, I argue, in the tension between two poles: justifying the world, this world of negativity, division, and endless striving – and annihilating or dissolving it in the bliss of absolute identity and freedom, in which there is no world, and no possibility of or need for a world. (shrink)

“The A2 is Light,” Schelling explains to us in the Presentation of My System of Philosophy. Is such a statement meaningful, so that its truth value can be asked? Is it an empirical statement, which can be tested and possibly confirmed through observations? Or is it a synthetic a priori judgment independent of observations? Such questions are not easy to answer, and they are related to the logical status of Schelling’s theory as a whole. That such questions became important stems (...) from the peculiarity of the philosophical systems that were developed in Jena after 1800. They were called “systems of absolute idealism,” but it is not clear what this means. These systems include not only Schelling’s but also Hegel’s and Krause’s. In the following, some commonalities, as well as specific particularities, of these systems will be examined in more detail from the standpoint of methodology. (shrink)