Berger and Whistler provide a ground-breaking account of Schelling's first controversy with his critic A.C.A. Eschenmayer in 1801, which focused on the philosophy of nature. They argue that key Schellingian concepts, such as identity, potency and abstraction, were first forged in his early debate with Eschenmayer.

Chez Ruyer, il y a une rupture flagrante entre le « panmécanisme » des débuts, élaboré dans l’Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure, et le panpsychisme de la maturité. Nous verrons que son inscription dans le premier lui donna l’occasion d’entrer dans ce qu’il repère comme étant la « grande voie naturelle de la philosophie ». Celle-ci consiste à chercher, en l’homme, la trace du mode d’être commun à l’ensemble des individualités psycho-biologiques. L’appartenance de Ruyer à cette « grande voie (...) » ne s’est jamais démentie, de sorte que l’on peut dire du « panmécanisme » de départ, que Ruyer a rapidement abandonné, qu’il fut fécond au moins d’un point de vue méthodologique. (shrink)

This thesis is a study of the relationship between 'nature' and 'spirit' in the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. I aim to show that Schelling and Hegel are involved in a shared task of conceiving spiritual freedom as a necessary outcome of nature's inner, rational development. I argue that by interpreting spirit as 'emergent' from nature, the absolute idealists develop a 'third way' beyond Cartesian dualism and monist naturalism. For on the idealist account, nature and spirit are neither (...) ontologically discontinuous, as if separated by an insurmountable 'gap', nor are they identical, as if spirit were simply a 'second nature'. Rather, according to both Schelling and Hegel, spirit emerges from nature as its ontologically distinct and non-natural telos. What makes Schelling's and Hegel's philosophies of nature so unique, however, is not simply that they present spiritual freedom as dependent upon nature, but that the ontological specificity of spirit is shown to be rationally necessary. In fact, neither the early Schelling nor Hegel is concerned with the historical emergence of spirit. Rather, both philosophers see the 'emergence' of spirit as an atemporal feature of being that must be derived through sheer reason—be it Schelling’s method of 'depotentiation' or Hegel's dialectical logic. I therefore argue that by bracketing the question of historical emergence, Schelling and Hegel each develop a distinctive logic of emergence whereby spiritual freedom is shown to be necessary thanks to the ontological structure of the impersonal, natural world. In my concluding chapter, I consider Schelling's argument in his Berlin lectures of the 1840s that the idealist logic of emergence must be supplemented with a speculative consideration of historical emergence if philosophy is to be a complete science of reality. From this perspective, it looks as though both Hegel's and the early Schelling's 'logics of emergence', despite all their promise, presuppose the idea that nature's necessary stages need not express themselves in temporal succession in order for them to be fully realised. I conclude the thesis by suggesting that Schelling's Ages of the World was meant to overcome this apparent limit of the 'logic of emergence' without abandoning its fundamental aims. For in the Ages, nature's rationally necessary development is presented as unfolding in time, and time is understood as nothing other than the actual development of nature into spirit. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de souligner la proximité des philosophies de Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) et de Charles-Augustus Strong (1862-1940). Ruyer est resté discret quant à ce qu’il retenait de sa lecture de Strong ; s’il est clair que la thèse défendue par le philosophe américain sur les rapports de la conscience et du corps a déterminé sa propre position sur le sujet, il n’est pas moins certain que d’autres thèses de Strong ont également retenu son attention. Il ne (...) s’agit pas ici de relativiser l’originalité de la philosophie ruyérienne mais bien de prendre acte de la richesse de l’une de ses sources les plus importantes et méconnues du public français. (shrink)

This book develops an original interpretation of the relationship between F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. It argues that the difference between these philosophers must be understood in light of their shared commitment to the philosophy of nature and the idea that spirit, or humanity, emerges from the natural world. The author makes a case for the contemporary relevance of German idealist philosophy of nature by walking the reader through its major themes, motivations, and arguments. Along the way, Schelling and Hegel (...) are shown to develop key insights about the structure of reality and the dependence of living things and human beings upon inorganic natural processes. In elucidating the details of Schelling's and Hegel's respective philosophies of nature, the book challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the scope of philosophical inquiry and the relationship between matter, life, and human existence. Schelling, Hegel, and the Philosophy of Nature will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on German idealism, as well as those interested in contemporary philosophies of nature and the topic of emergence. (shrink)

This article presents the argument that our understanding of the nature of the relationship between modern constitutionalism and religious difference has suffered with the success of the story of legal tolerance and multiculturalism. Taking up the Canadian case, in which the conventional narrative of legal multiculturalism has such purchase, this piece asks how the interaction of law and religion – and, in particular, the practices of legal tolerance – would look if we sought in earnest to understand law as a (...) component, rather than a curator, of cultural diversity in modern liberal societies. Understanding the law as itself a cultural form forces us to think about the interaction of law and religion as an instance of cross-cultural encounter. Drawing from theoretical accounts of cross-cultural encounter and philosophical literature about the nature of toleration, and paying close attention to the shape of Canadian constitutional doctrine on religious freedom , this paper suggests that legal toleration is far less accommodative and far more assimilative than the conventional narrative lets on. Influential alternative theoretical accounts ultimately reproduce this dynamic because they similarly obscure the role of culture on both sides of the encounter of law and religion. Indeed, owing to the particular features of the culture of law’s rule, even the more thickly cultural “solutions” proposed in dialogic theory ultimately fail. In the end, this article exposes the very real cultural limits of legal tolerance. (shrink)