Schelling's Naturalism

Ben Woodard is an affiliated fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin Germany. He has published numerous texts on the relation between naturalism and idealism as well as the history, philosophy, and politics of biology. He is the author of Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

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.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The Natural Forge of the Transcendental: The Movement of Thought and the Space of Nature; 2. Castles of Ether and Asymptotic Bridges: Kant, Maimon, Schelling, and the Relation of Inner and Outer Sense; 3. The Force of the Continuous: Schelling’s Naturalization of Mathematics; 4. The Red Threads of the World: Potenzen, Construction, and Inexistence; 5. Lamps, Rainbows, Unicorns, and Horizons: Spatializing Knowledge in Naturphilosophical Epistemology; 6. Speculative Pragmatism: Traversing the Richtungen of Nature and Thought; Bibliography.