We are glad to announce that G. Anthony Bruno, Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, will be presenting a paper in a workshop at the University of Florence. The paper is entitled “The Facticity of Time: Conceiving Schelling’s Idealism of Ages”. The workshop will meet on Friday, March 13th 2015 (h. 3.30 pm) at the Department of Philosophy, Università di Firenze, via Bolognese 52 (Sala Conferenze).

Here is an abstract of the presentation

Scholars agree that Schelling’s critique of Hegel consists in charging reason with an inability to account for its own possibility. This is not an attack on reason’s project of constructing a logical system, but rather on the pretense of doing so with complete justification and so without presuppositions, as if it were obvious why there a logical system or why there is anything meaningful at all. Scholars accordingly cite the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ as emblematic of Schelling’s critique and the source of his claim against Hegel that reason is bounded by something other than itself. But what sort of claim is this? For what sort of argument could it be the conclusion? On these questions, the literature is lacking. I propose that the question ‘why something’ motivates Schelling to give a transcendental argument to the effect that the past and future are not merely empirical events, but a priori conditions of the possibility of reason. As I reconstruct it from the Weltalter, this argument construes past and future as transcendental conditions presupposed by reason’s construction of any logical system. Schelling’s claim that reason is bounded by something other than itself is thus the discovery of conditions that, understood as inescapable presuppositions, bound reason itself.

*G. Anthony Bruno is Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, hosted by Markus Gabriel. In 2013, he completed his PhD at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Paul Franks. He works mainly on issues in metaphysics and epistemology in Kant, German idealism and 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy. His current project reconstructs a theory of temporality from Schelling’s middle period in order to understand his critique of Hegel and its effect on Kierkegaard’s conception of the future and Nietzsche’s conception of the past.

 

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