Locates in Schelling a new understanding of our relation to nature in philosophy.

I explore how the "synthesis of history and nature" that defines the Anthropocene might signal the advent of the “new mythology” Schelling hoped would emerge from his Naturphilosophie. The epistemological dimension of this new mythology is to be understood through Schelling’s idea of Mitwissenschaft, in which humanity is the essential active agent in the reflexive system of the world. Such an inquiry derives not from a sentimental longing for an enchanted world, but from the impending “annihilation of nature” Schelling foresaw (...) in 1804. The resulting organic episteme introduces a new realism in which nature, because absolute, becomes normative. (shrink)

_The first English translation of Schelling’s final “existential system.”_.

The natural based view of the firm using Hart (1995) is applied to firm responses in the Carbon Disclose Project (CDP) database. A large cross sectional sample(n=573) of North American and European firms is divided into 3 categories of proactivity to the climate change issue using 8 indicators of four resource domains. Results are presented along geographic and size dimensions.

Compassion is a prosocial motivation that is critical to the development and survival of the human species. Cultivating compassion involves developing deep wisdom, insight, and understanding into the nature and causes of human suffering; and wisdom and commitment to take positive action to alleviate suffering. This perspective piece discusses how compassion relates to the context of modern technology, which has developed at a rapid pace in recent decades. While advances in digital technology build on humankind’s vast capacity to develop practical (...) tools that promise to enrich our lives and improve our social connections, in reality the effects are often far from benign. The motives underlying the development of many contemporary digital platforms seem rooted in competitiveness and capitalism; while modern social media and online platforms are having a profound and pervasive impact on the mental health and wellbeing of humans around the globe. Nonetheless, digital technology holds considerable potential to promote compassionate insight, wisdom, and prosocial behavior. We reflect on the current state of technology within human society and examine the notion of compassionate technologies; discuss how contemporary paradigm shifts such as the inclusive design movement may be harnessed to build tools and platforms that promote collective good and increase prosocial behavior; and highlight examples of initiatives that are harnessing modern technology to advance democracy, collective knowledge, and personal freedoms and agency. (shrink)

Abstract:In the following essay I attempt a Schellingian response to the question of what it means to do philosophy in anticipation of civilizational collapse and the end of nature as we know it. As early as 1804 Schelling foresees how the spirit of modernity would lead to what he called “the annihilation of Nature,” but he also advanced a host of ideas that speak directly to our current dilemma. Most importantly for our purposes he held that every significant idea is (...) always as ethical as it is metaphysical: “the highest speculative concepts” must always be “simultaneously the most profound ethical concepts” (II, 3, 67). Ontology, epistemology, logic, aesthetics must all be understood ethically, a point which is seen most clearly in the demand for thoroughgoing systematic unity: the highest speculative concept of unity that must be informed by the most profound ethical experience of the unity of nature which alone can sanctify the positive meaning philosophy must engender if it is to transform human consciousness by increasing awareness of our nature as nature. Such a transformed awareness founds his call for a new way of thinking and doing philosophy that would be as different from the modern as the modern was from the ancient; as ancient referred to the past and, etymologically ‘modern’ denotes the present, he argues for a new way of thinking directed by the ethical tense of the future, in which the absolute becomes the future understood as that which should be (das Seinsollende). To anticipate, I posit the normativity of nature which, as the sustainer of the relational web of the living world, supplies the absolute value to orient humanity’s future. This requires an ecstatic ontology as well as an ethics and epistemology which unite in an erotics of the earth that, by integrating the immediate and sensuous reality of living nature, opens us to a more dynamic way of doing philosophy; one whose primary mode is more haptic than ocular, working by feeling and touch more than abstraction and sight, as it returns love to wisdom and elevates the future to determine the present. (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)

The speculative power of theoretical reason is not only incapable of grounding itself, but is also powerless to integrate and unify all of the different aspects of our intellectual and spiritual life. This impotency of what Schelling called negative philosophy gives rise to the demand for a positive philosophy that supplies the integrative grounding in which das Unvordenkliche—that before which nothing can be thought—is rooted. I contrast what Schelling calls an “inverted concept” with Huineng’s account of wu-nien (no-thought) found in (...) the Platform Sutra (Tun-Huang Manuscript). Both Schelling and Huineng advance their respective ideas as not only the necessary basis of their thinking, but as a necessary experience one must undergo in order to realize and thus truly comprehend their teaching. Huineng connects this lived knowing with sudden enlightenment, while Schelling speaks of the exuberant fullness of ecstasy. I close with a brief account of Schelling’s appeal for pluralistic tolerance among different philosophical and religious traditions, in which he argues that such traditions are in error to the degree they lay claim to exclusive and infallible truth. (shrink)

Although hailing from cognate analytical schools, the contributors to Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter’s edited volume Conversation and Cognition hold a remarkable diversity of views on the nature of “mental states” and their import for the purposes of analyzing naturally occurring interaction. I offer a critical analysis of some of the contributors’ discussions of cognition in social interaction in an effort to clarify some obstinate issues with respect to the meanings of words in our cognitive vocabulary (e.g. “thought” and (...) “realization”) and their identification in analyses of conversation. (shrink)