Recent considerations of mind and world react against philosophical naturalisation strategies by maintaining that the thought of the world is normatively driven to reject reductive or bald naturalism. This paper argues that we may reject bald or ‘thoughtless’ naturalism without sacrificing nature to normativity and so retreating from metaphysics to transcendental idealism. The resources for this move can be found in theNaturphilosophieoutlined by the German Idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. He argues that because thought occurs in the same universe as thought (...) thinks, it remains part of that universe whose elements in consequence now additionally include that thought. A philosophy of nature beginning from such a position neither shaves thought from a thoughtless nature nor transcendentally reduces nature to the content of thought, since a thought occurring in nature only has ‘all nature’ as its content when that thought is additive rather than summative. A natural history of mind drawn from Schellingian premises therefore entails that, while a thought may have ‘all nature’ as its content, this thought is itself the partial content of the nature augmented by it. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect that began in his lifetime, why has Schelling reemerged as an important philosopher, germane to contemporary concerns? In the first part of this essay I offer a brief history of Schelling’s early descent into obscurity and gradual ascent back into the light of philosophical relevance. In the second and final part of the essay, I offer a brief survey of the current Schelling resurgence in the English speaking reception of Continental philosophy.

This essay interprets Schelling's positive philosophy as an effort to conceive nature as a gift. Schelling ruminated throughout his career on the paradoxical relation between humanity and nature that is expressed in the contemporary term “Anthropocene,” but this essay argues that Schelling's most productive response to this paradox can be found in his reflections on how to receive the gift of nature. After laying out the project of positive philosophy, the essay first explores Schelling's effort to conceive nature as a (...) gift in On the World-Soul, and then considers how this project founders in the First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy. After the resources of the natural sciences showed themselves to be inadequate to the task of conceiving nature as a gift, Schelling returned to mythology in his late philosophy, and the concluding section of this essay traces how an often overlooked Epicurean strain in Schelling's late philosophy can help us see what is entailed in conceiving nature as a gift. (shrink)

This is a translation of the second chapter of F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. It is preceded by a brief introduction in which I situate the chapter within Schelling's oeuvre and suggest that it is not only an early articulation of Schellingian Naturphilosophie, but also prescient, anticipating Schelling's later positive philosophy.

Was ich mit dieser Artikel hier zu zeigen versuchen werde, ist eine gewisse Affinität zwischen Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schellings Konzeptionen und Auffassungen einer Naturphilosophie in den Jahren 1797-1801 und Hans Jonas‘ ontologisch-philosophische Biologie 1, die er in Organismus und Freiheit – Ansätze zu einer philosophischen Biologie entwickelte. Die hier zu erwähnende Schellingsche Naturphilosophie ist die in der Zeit zwischen Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur vom Jahr 1797 und Ueber den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige Art ihre Probleme (...) aufzulösen vom Jahr 1801 entwickelte Konzeption einer Philosophie der Natur.2 Damit schließe ich mich einer These Odo Marquards an: Schelling sei der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts ein Zeitgenosse inkognito. Nur wünsche ich der prominenten Reihe von Philosophen, die Marquard – zwei Jahre nach der Veröffentlichung von Organismus und Freiheit – im Jahr 1975 aufstellte, den Name ‚Hans Jonas‘ hinzufügen. Es soll somit versucht werden, die Möglichkeit dafür zu öffnen, dass die Naturphilosophie Schellings im Lichte der philosophischen Biologie Jonas‘ gesehen werden kann. Damit wünsche ich zu verdeutlichen, dass der Problembereich und frühen Philosophie Schellings durch Jonas‘ Philosophie einen Repräsentant finden, und dass sie mit der Problematik Jonas‘ eine gewisse Aktualität gewinnen könnte. (shrink)

What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction’ due to anthropogenic climate change has obliged us to rethink our traditional assumptions about the rapport between ourselves and nature. While the reconceptualization of nature has largely been led by scientists and environmental theorists and activists, this paper argues that Schelling provides the best and earliest model for rethinking nature in the Anthropocene. To this end, Schelling critiques two approaches to nature. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s idealism for reducing nature to an instrument (...) for the self-assertion of our egos much like modern industrial capitalism views nature as an economic resource to be exploited for human gain. Further, Schelling critiques Spinoza for mechanizing nature as a structurally invariant system in the same way that climate change denialists hold that the earth’s ecosystem is perfectly homeostatic. Having dismissed these two approaches, Schelling develops another environmentally ethical conception of nature to answer the question of how the free human subject emerges out of an allegedly blind and lifeless nature. Schelling’s solution to safeguarding nature is to paradoxically anthropomorphize it further by reconceiving it as always-already structured as per the dynamic free spirit. This paper shall thus conclude by extracting two environmentally ethical principles that Schelling’s anthropomorphization of nature entails. Contra Fichte, the ‘dependency principle’ states that humans are radically dependent upon nature rather than nature being dependent on our positing it as an object of our intuition. Moreover, the ‘contingency principle’ stipulates against Spinoza that nature is itself contingent, dynamic and precarious. In this way, Schelling provides a conceptualization of nature befitting the demands placed upon thought in the age of the sixth extinction. (shrink)