Kingston Philosophy Café

At 19:00 Professor Peter Dews will give a talk to the Kingston Philosophy Café on the topic "Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism".  In doing so, he will touch on issues raised in Thomas Nagel's book "Mind and Cosmos".

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (27 January 1775 – 20 August 1854), was a German philosopher. Many histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German Idealism, situating him between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his one-time university roommate, early friend, and later rival. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is regarded as difficult because of its evolving nature. Schelling's Naturphilosophie has also been attacked by scientists for its tendency to analogise and for a lack of empirical orientation.

For details of this Zoom meeting, please contact kingstonphilosophycafe@gmail.com, and we will reply with the details.

Summary

     By the end of the 18^th century philosophy was in the midst of an existential crisis. The development of the natural sciences sat uneasily besides the traditional philosophical concerns with human freedom, and theological attempts to understand the universe as having an underlying purpose. In addition, the French revolution had shown that the enlightenment critique of irrationality could be applied to the political , and not just the scientific, realm. These three sources of fracture in our understandings of science, religion and politics created a fundamental problem of orientation.

     The aim of this class will be to show how F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854) in his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism attempts to construct a philosophical system to hold together a fragmenting world view. Central to Schelling's attempt is a recognition that the opposition between subject and object can be understood as having two roots. These two roots of the subject object relation overlap with our scientific and moral/religious images of the world. From the perspective of the natural sciences we can deduce the existence of the external world through a causal account of its development. This is one which we can even apply to ourselves. A rough analogue of this is an attempt to reduce the experience of consciousness to neurological phenomena. However, from the perspective of transcendental idealism – the philosophical theory developed by Immanuel Kant – we can deduce the existence of the objective world from the unifying activity of consciousness. From this perspective what we see is that all representations of reality – including scientific representations – are dependent on a conscious subject in order for them to be intelligible. One of the questions which Schelling attempts to answer in the System of Transcendental Idealism is which image of the world, the naturalistic scientific one or the transcendental and moral one, is prior. Through the first we get an image of the reality which is rational and causal but ultimately lifeless, and through the second we get an image of the world which puts human subjectivity and agency at the centre but at the risk of implausible idealism. It is, Schelling thinks, the job of philosophy to retrace the steps which lead to the two different subject-object oppositions and to propose an activity which can unify our fragmentary image of the world. For Schelling, unlike his contemporary G. W. F. Hegel (1770-18310, this activity is not politics but art.

Readings

Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. (2012) Oxford University Press.

Extracts from Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism.