This comprehensive, general introduction to Schelling's philosophy shows that it was Schelling who set the agenda for German idealism and defined the term of its characteristic problems.

Schelling's 1806 polemic against Fichte, and his last major work on the philosophy of nature. The heat of anger can concentrate the mind. Convinced that he had been betrayed by his former collaborator and colleague, Schelling attempts in this polemic to reach a final reckoning with Fichte. Employing the format of a book review, Schelling directs withering scorn at three of Fichte’s recent publications, at one point likening them to the hell, purgatory, and would-be paradise of Fichtean philosophy. The central (...) bone of contention is the understanding of nature: Fichte sees it as lifeless matter in motion, sheer opposition to be overcome, while Schelling waxes poetic in his defense of a living, organic nature of which humanity is a vital part. Indeed, we do not know ourselves without understanding our connection to nature, argues Schelling, anticipating many thinkers in contemporary environmental ethics. Dale E. Snow’s introduction sets the stage and explains the larger context of the conflict, which was already visible in the correspondence of the two philosophers, which broke off by 1802. Notes are included throughout the text, providing background information and identifying the many references to Fichte. Dale E. Snow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Maryland and the author of Schelling and the End of Idealism, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

Peter Cheyne may have understood Coleridge better than the latter understood himself. This book provides an extensive road map to many of the highways and byways Coleridge wandered down in both prose and poetry, and it does so without ever losing sight of the ultimate goal of the journey: a philosophy of contemplative ideas, an ideal-realism that brought together these many disparate influences. For Cheyne, Coleridge is a thinker of the first rank, whose achievement—the philosophy of contemplation, which presents a (...) "view of intuitive reason and its ideas that shape humanity" —could have great value for the future direction of philosophy.Although Cheyne identifies three main periods in Coleridge's intellectual... (shrink)

In the Differenzschrift of 1801 Hegel declares himself to be in agreement with Schelling that the most fundamental task of philosophy is to overcome [aufheben] traditional oppositions such as subjectivity and objectivity, reason and sensuality, intelligence and nature. It has been claimed that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 and Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism can be fruitfully interpreted as parallel attempts to overcome these oppositions, identified by Hegel as ultimately derived from the dichotomy between absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity. (...) Since Schelling claims to present a history of consciousness, whereas Hegel intends to demonstrate the history of spirit in its alienation and progress toward knowledge of itself as spirit, it has often been supposed that the System was a preliminary, abortive attempt at the all-embracing vision the Phenomenology claims to provide. Hegel himself seems to have held such a view, yet Schelling vigorously disputes this assessment of the System. (shrink)

F.W.J. von Schelling was the philosopher whom Hegel accused of conducting his philosophical education in public, and Joseph Lawrence's title neatly captures and acknowledges a fundamental tension running throughout Schelling's nearly sixty years of philosophical productivity. Schelling was indeed a philosopher of many beginnings, and always returned to a concern with beginnings, in a way one might have thought Kant had rendered permanently unfashionable; yet in many ways the very profusion of his philosophies was, as Heidegger has observed, evidence of (...) his unrelenting and stubborn desire to get to the root of being. What Lawrence calls "die Unvordenklichkeit des Seins" was always Schelling's primary concern. (shrink)

The “Treatise on the Relationship of the Real and the Ideal in Nature, or the Development of the First Principles of the Philosophy of Nature and the Principles of Gravity and Light” is one of the last essays on Naturphilosophie that Schelling wrote. It was a topic that had occupied his attention since 1796, and as such it marks the end of an era. It is distinguished by its unusual approach to the problem of matter, which becomes, in his discussion, (...) the problem of force or energy. Without being able to avail himself of the language of the conservation of energy or mass, it can be argued that Schelling makes a valiant attempt to express that insight, using the terminology of the bond and the entities bound by it. The text reaffirms Schelling’s strong affinities with Spinoza, anticipates Schopenhauer, and continues his quarrel with Fichte. (shrink)