On the History of Modern Philosophy

by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Andrew Bowie (Translator)

On the History of Modern Philosophy is a key transitional text in the history of European philosophy. In it F.W.J. Schelling surveys philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism and shows why the Idealist project is ultimately doomed to failure. Schelling's work traces the path of philosophy from Descartes through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, to Hegel and Schelling's own work. The extensive critiques of Hegel prefigure many of the arguments to be found in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.

Genres: Philosophy, Germany, History

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 27, 1827

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German Idealism, situating him between Fichte, his mentor prior to 1800, and Hegel, his former university roommate and erstwhile friend. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is often difficult because of its ever-changing nature. Some scholars characterize him as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system. Others challenge the notion that Schelling's thought is marked by profound breaks, instead arguing that his philosophy always focused on a few common themes, especially human freedom, the absolute, and the relationship between spirit and nature.

Schelling's thought has often been neglected, especially in the English-speaking world. This stems not only from the ascendancy of Hegel, whose mature works portray Schelling as a mere footnote in the development of Idealism, but also from his Naturphilosophie, which positivist scientists have often ridiculed for its "silly" analogizing and lack of empirical orientation. In recent years, Schelling scholars have forcefully attacked both of these sources of neglect.

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those history of philosophy texts that really feel 'alive'. Schelling reaches out to the past and extracts a lesson here and an insight there from each of the giants of philosophical modernity (esp. Spinoza) with a strategic view towards affirming the supremacy of his own system of identity philosophy. The bane of all systems, as Jacobi later realized, is the challenge of deriving finitude from the Absolute and doing so--one might add--without robbing finite rational beings of their freedom. Not even Kant's critical philosophy can escape this problematic. Doomed from the start is any system that cannot provide an account of how and why which conditioned conditions and finite beings result from the unconditioned, granted that the Absolute is posited in the first place (whether the Absolute is posited hypothetically, constitutively, regulatively, etc. matters little). Schelling hopes to get around this challenge by breathing life or 'real opposition' into the infinite being and converting the Spinozist substance into Absolute subject that goes through a series of potentiations up till the emergence of rational organisms. The resulting Naturphilosophie then can boast of the immediate transition from infinite to the finite driven by a primordial tension between self attraction of Being towards itself and self-repulsion of Being away from itself. But this identity- system is not without its detractors. Indeed, once Schelling gets to Hegel, his writing visibly loses its liveliness from earlier lectures and becomes very tense over the next thirty something pages. Schelling not only attempts to defend his system from the Hegelian charge (the identity-system presupposes the Absolute through Fichtean "intellectual intuition" instead of deriving it as an end result) but also accuses Hegel of taking over the method the nature-philosopher has invented for "real potentials" in nature and applying (fruitlessly, in Schelling's opinion) to the Concept to give the latter an appearance of much celebrated "self-movement".

[Sina · Rating 4 out of 5]

به نظرم عمومی‌ترین فایده‌ی ارائه‌ی درس‌گفتارهای شلینگ در باب تاریخ فلسفه‌ی جدید، آن است که به روشنی نشان می‌دهد تاریخِ فلسفه چه جایگاه محوری‌ای در خودِ عملِ فلسفیدن دارد.
بصیرت‌های شلینگ گاه شگفت‌آور و به طرز غیرقابلِ باوری پیشگامانه به نظر می‌آیند و گاه مانند نقدهایش به کانت و هگل، نابسنده( و در موردِ هگل شاید تأثیر پذیرفته از هیجانات شخصی) و ره به مشربِ مقصود نبرده.
برای من مهمترین جنبه‌ی این درس‌گفتارها تشخیص دادن بذری بود که از دلش کسانی چون کیرکگور و بعدها هایدگر درآمدند. بذری که دقیقن همان که خودِ شلینگ گاه به گاه از آن به عنوانِ فلسفه‌ی ثبوتی یاد می‌کند نیست، اما به طور حتم نسبتی با آن پیدا می‌کند.

[Selma Slocum · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his text titled "On the History of Modern Philosophy", Schelling investigates the systems of all major modern philosophers, starting with Descartes and ending with Hegel. During the course of this detailed examination, he highlights the major problem dealt with within the modern philosophical tradition; that being the problem of subject-object dualism, which can be reformulated as that duality between mind and matter, the ideal and the real, and thought and being. He does not shy away from sharing his honest views, which prove to be very useful in gaining a better understanding for his own position and his own concerns. Ultimately, he presents his own system, as outlined in his Naturphilosophie.

[Socrates · Rating 5 out of 5]

笔大如椽，像高悬夜空的启明星，读者的当务之急是脚踏实地，不把他的气魄误认成自己的能耐。胸有成竹，点睛之笔；胸无点墨，稚子涂鸦。他写哲学理论，勾哲学家肖像、时代语境，结构老生常谈，谢林特别，他排布文章不靠写作格式的教导，靠活跃奋进的头脑。《为维克多·库桑先生哲学著作所作序》向看不清的历史打出一束光，表明分析哲学的反形而上学倾向搭箭瞄向的德国古典哲学是一个稻草人。

以自家哲学为目的写史，我怀疑遮掩了哲学演进的更复杂动态，批判不一定确凿。他的写法：斯宾诺莎的必然性体系如何静止僵化，引入莱布尼茨的单子论，再说两者失之察觉或发展对立，结尾道：学院派形而上学均未说明独立思考倚赖的理性，即康德后来的哥本哈根革命。相应的，我认为二手工作的考察方向：（1）谢林的一一评点；（2）谢林提及的哲学家继承批判关系。

[Carl Hindsgaul · Rating 5 out of 5]

En gennemgang og naturfilosofisk dvs. Schellingsk kritik af særligt rationalistisk filosofi (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel m.fl.), og derudover en fremlæggelse af Schellings egne naturfilosofiske synspunkter.