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.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction0.1 - Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy0.2 - Schelling’s Ablative Systematicity0.3 - Schelling’s Synthetic Method0.4 - Chapter Outline1.0 - The Natural Forge of the Transcendental: The Movement of Thought and the Space of Nature1.1 - Thought as Direction: Schelling via Kant1.2 - Thought as Activity: Schelling via Fichte1.3 - Thought as Nature: Schelling via Spinoza1.4 - The Missing Gesture: Plato and Aristotle via Schelling2.0 - Castles of Ether and Asymptotic Bridges: Kant, Maimon, Schelling, and the Relation of Inner and Outer Sense2.1 - 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 Ideality2.4 - Schelling’s Dynamization of The Critique of Judgment3 - The Force of the Continuous: Schelling’s Naturalization of Mathematics3.1 - Schelling on Mathematics3.2 - Schelling’s Extensity/Intensity Relation3.3 - Potencies and Trajectories3.4 - (Re)Constructing Continuity or Folding Math into Nature4 - The Red Threads of the World: Potenzen, Construction, and Inexistence4.1 - 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 Modalities5 – Lamps, Rainbows, Unicorns, and Horizons: Spatializing Knowledge in Naturphilosophical Epistemology5.1- Epistemology and the Stufenfolge (Derivation)5.2 - Epistemology and the Field Problem (Determination)5.3 - Rationalizing Rainbows: Between Sense and Observation5.4 - Rationalizing Unicorns: Between Facts and Sense5.5 - Gestural Scars: Châtelet and Intuitive Anchoring6 - Speculative Pragmatism: Traversing the Richtungen of Nature and Thought6.1 - Abducting Matter: Peirce and Schelling6.2 - What Does Naturalism do to the Brain?/What Does Nature do the Mind?6.3 - Impure Immediacies: Sellars and Schelling6.4 - Netting Nature through Norms?: McDowell and Brandom6.5 - Tethered Ekstasis or The Speculative ‘Go of It’BibliographyCurriculum Vitae