Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought

by Ben Woodard

Overview

Using Schelling’s philosophy, Ben Woodard examines how an expanded form of naturalism changes how we conceive of the division between thought and world, mathematics and motion, sense and dynamics, experiment and materiality, as well as speculation and pragmatism. Nature, in Schelling’s eyes, is not the great outdoors or some authentic pastoral realm, but the various powers, processes and tendencies which run through biology, chemistry, physics and the very possibility of thought itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474438179
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/26/2019
Series:	New Perspectives in Ontology
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ben Woodard is Post-doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Art Theory (IPK) at Leuphana Universityin Luneburg, Germany. His research focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism, especially during the long 19th Century.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

0.1 - Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy

0.2 - Schelling’s Ablative Systematicity

0.3 - Schelling’s Synthetic Method

0.4 - Chapter Outline

1.0 - The Natural Forge of the Transcendental: The Movement of Thought and the Space of Nature

1.1 - Thought as Direction: Schelling via Kant

1.2 - Thought as Activity: Schelling via Fichte

1.3 - Thought as Nature: Schelling via Spinoza

1.4 - The Missing Gesture: Plato and Aristotle via Schelling

2.0 - Castles of Ether and Asymptotic Bridges: Kant, Maimon, Schelling, and the Relation of Inner and Outer Sense

2.1 - Kant’s ‘What is Called Orientation in Thinking?’

2.2 - The Ether Proofs: Crystallizing Space or Concretizing Ideality?

2.3 - Magnitudes and Determination: Maimon’s Polarized Ideality

2.4 - Schelling’s Dynamization of The Critique of Judgment

3 - The Force of the Continuous: Schelling’s Naturalization of Mathematics

3.1 - Schelling on Mathematics

3.2 - Schelling’s Extensity/Intensity Relation

3.3 - Potencies and Trajectories

3.4 - (Re)Constructing Continuity or Folding Math into Nature

4 - The Red Threads of the World: Potenzen, Construction, and Inexistence

4.1 - Schelling’s Dynamics as Proto-Potenz in The First Outline, The Ideas, System of Transcendental Idealism (1795-1800)

4.2 - Schelling’s Potenz in the Universal Deduction, Presentation, and Philosophy of Art (1804)

4.3 -Philosophy of Religion (1804), Freedom Essay (1809), Stuttgart Seminars (1810)

4.4 - Ages of the World (1815), History of Modern Philosophy (1832-1833) Darstellung der Rein Rationalephilosophie, Grounding (1842-1843)

4.5 - Potencies and Modalities

5 – Lamps, Rainbows, Unicorns, and Horizons: Spatializing Knowledge in Naturphilosophical Epistemology

5.1- Epistemology and the Stufenfolge (Derivation)

5.2 - Epistemology and the Field Problem (Determination)

5.3 - Rationalizing Rainbows: Between Sense and Observation

5.4 - Rationalizing Unicorns: Between Facts and Sense

5.5 - Gestural Scars: Châtelet and Intuitive Anchoring

6 - Speculative Pragmatism: Traversing the Richtungen of Nature and Thought

6.1 - Abducting Matter: Peirce and Schelling

6.2 - What Does Naturalism do to the Brain?/What Does Nature do the Mind?

6.3 - Impure Immediacies: Sellars and Schelling

6.4 - Netting Nature through Norms?: McDowell and Brandom

6.5 - Tethered Ekstasis or The Speculative ‘Go of It’

Bibliography

Curriculum Vitae

What People are Saying About This

University of the West of England in Bristol Iain Hamilton Grant

A rare piece of philosophising combining exemplary historical sweep with immediate contemporary pertinence. At the heart of this work, an admirable conceptual archaeology of Schelling’s powers ontology provides the foundation for a claim entirely Schellingian in inspiration yet contemporary in orientation; namely that constructionism, the idealism of our age, furnishes not an alternative to the philosophy of nature, but forms the choreography of nature-philosophising just when philosophising consequently forms it.

Editorial Reviews

A rare piece of philosophising combining exemplary historical sweep with immediate contemporary pertinence. At the heart of this work, an admirable conceptual archaeology of Schelling’s powers ontology provides the foundation for a claim entirely Schellingian in inspiration yet contemporary in orientation; namely that constructionism, the idealism of our age, furnishes not an alternative to the philosophy of nature, but forms the choreography of nature-philosophising just when philosophising consequently forms it.

University of the West of England in Bristol Iain Hamilton Grant