Abstract

This appraisal became conventional opinion, and has remained conventional opinion until this day. In practically any history of philosophy which bothers with Schelling at all one can find this threefold condemnation of his work: that it consists of a number of more or less disconnected systems; that none of these is properly worked out; and that from 1804 on, they get worse and worse. As a result of this opinion, few historians have been interested in Schelling. When in 1944 air raids destroyed the Munich University Library, among the treasures destroyed were thousands of Schelling manuscript pages, mostly written in his later years. It seems that in nearly one hundred years nobody was sufficiently interested in these manuscripts to do anything with them.