F.W.J. Schelling

1775-1854 · German · Metaphysics, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mythology, Ontology, Philosophy of History

Philosophy is nothing but a doctrine of the nature of our mind.

At eighteen, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was already publishing philosophy. A prodigy at the Tübingen seminary where he roomed with Hegel and Hölderlin, he raced through Kant and Fichte and arrived at a question that would haunt him for six decades: how does a world of living, self-organising nature fit inside a philosophy built for a detached, legislating mind?

Topics F.W.J. Schelling addresses

• Naturphilosophie
• nature as productivity
• the absolute as identity of subject and object
• the point of indifference
• intellectual intuition
• aesthetic intuition as the highest organ of philosophy
• the conscious and unconscious in artistic genius
• ground and existence in God
• the dark ground
• freedom as the capacity for good and evil
• positive evil as inversion of principles
• the unprethinkable
• positive philosophy vs negative philosophy
• the Ages of the World
• the rotation of potencies
• philosophy of mythology
• philosophy of revelation
• self-organisation of matter
• polarity and the potency-series
• magnetism, electricity, and chemical process as potencies
• sensibility, irritability, and formative drive
• the history of self-consciousness
• the break with Fichte
• willing as primal being

Converse with F.W.J. Schelling on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in F.W.J. Schelling's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.