Episode 23: Schelling's Early Philosophy of Nature

So with you having so much knowledge about Schelling, can you give us a little bit of background about this text, which is the ideas, the 1797 ideas for the philosophy of nature? Like what is Schelling responding to? What is he coming out of here? This is a...

relatively early in his philosophical career, but he had written a couple of different essays and things before this.

Yeah.

So can you just give us some idea about the background of this text and Schelling's biography up to this point in his life?

Yeah.

So Schelling was precocious.

He grew up in a household where I think his father studied like classical languages and philology.

And so Schelling was doing that from an early age.

He went to university at the Tübinger Stift in 1790.

He was like 15 years old when he went.

He was roommates with Hegel and Hölderlin.

brilliantly dramatized in the Peter Weiss

Olderlin book also.

But yeah, there's a lot of early writings that are a little bit fragmentary.

He writes a short dissertation in Latin on scripture.

He's writing about myth at the time.

He has an early commentary that's just been recovered on Plato's Timaeus, which is interesting, which is sort of reading Plato through a transcendental philosophical perspective.

But really, his publications start in the mid-1790s.

He finishes his tenure at the theology school, the seminary school, in 1795.

Then he goes and he's in...

Leipzig for two years, and he is studying intensively during that time, natural sciences, as a result of which he publishes this in 1797.

So 1795 to 97, he's studying natural sciences, which is also why there's a, like the first part of this book is mostly just like a survey of the significance of recent discoveries in physics and chemistry in the study of magnetism.

meteorology.

And then the second part of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature is sort of his constructive approach, where he's testing out the possibility of more systematic ways of thinking about the unity of the sciences, how it is that we arrive at ideas in chemistry, and sort of playing around with the concept of force, which is going to be of central importance for his nature philosophical work.

in a fairly Fichtian way in this book.