We are glad to give notice of Schelling’s Mystical Platonism 1792-1802, by Naomi Fisher (Oxford University Press, 2024).

From the publisher’s website:

Schelling came of age during the pivotal and exciting years at the end of the eighteenth century, as Kant’s philosophy was being incorporated into the German academic world. At this time, in addition to delving into the new Kantian philosophy, Schelling engaged in an intense study of Plato’s dialogues and was immersed in a Neoplatonic intellectual culture. Attention to these aspects of Schelling’s early philosophical development illuminates his fundamental commitments. Throughout the first decade of his adult life, from 1792-1802, Schelling was a mystical Platonist.
Naomi Fisher argues that Schelling is committed to two overarching theses, which together comprise his mystical Platonism. First, Schelling considers the absolute to be ineffable: It cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system and is only intimated to us in certain analogical formulations, in works of art, or in nature as a whole. Second, Schelling is committed to a kind of priority monism: All things are grounded in the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence.
Highlighting these commitments resolves an interpretive dispute, according to which Schelling is a Fichtean idealist or a Spinozist, or he vacillates between these positions. Interpreting Schelling as advancing a mystical Platonism provides an alternative way of interpreting these early texts, such that they are by and large consistent. Fisher presents Schelling’s early philosophy as a unique and compelling fusion of the old and new: Schelling fulfills the characteristic aims of post-Kantian philosophy in a way distinctive among his contemporaries, by drawing on and appropriating various strands of Platonism.

 

Table of contents:

Introduction

PART I: SCHELLING’S PHILOSOPHICAL BEGINNINGS: 1792-1796
Chapter 1: Grounding and Unity: Schelling’s Philosophy in Context
Chapter 2: Mysticism in Schelling’s Plato-Notebooks of 1792-1794
Chapter 3: Schelling’s Timaeus-commentary: Integrating Plato and Kant
Chapter 4: Neoplatonism in Schelling’s Of the Eye and Letters

PART II: SCHELLING’S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENTS: 1797-1802
Chapter 5: Schelling’s Innovations: Neoplatonism in the 1797 Ideas and 1800 System
Chapter 6: Limit, the Unlimited, and Potency: Platonism in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature
Chapter 7: Mysticism in Schelling’s 1801-1802 Writings
Chapter 8: Priority Monism in Schelling’s 1801-1802 Writings

Conclusion
Bibliography

 

 

 

Printable Version