Nature, Speculation and the Return to Schelling

Two decades ago, Schelling first resurfaced in Žižek’s Indivisible Remainder, and the same argumentative move of redeploying Schellingian themes for contemporary ends has continued to play a significant role in critical theory since (Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Jean-Luc Nancy). All the articles in this volume attempt to take seriously the idea of Schelling as a contemporary philosopher: Schelling is read in dialogue with key figures in the canon of European philosophy and critical theory (Alain Badiou, Émilie du Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man, Quentin Meillassoux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilbert Simondon, Slavoj Žižek), as well as in light of recent trends in analytic philosophy (Brandomian pragmatism, powers-based metaphysics and semantic naturalism) – and such readings are not meant merely to highlight Schellingian influences or resonances in contemporary thinking but rather to challenge and interrogate current orthodoxies by insisting upon the contemporaneity of Schellingian speculation. That is, the aim is both to evaluate and constructively build upon this repeated return to Schelling: to probe, to diagnose and to experiment on the latent Schellingianisms of the present and the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

1. Editorial Introduction: Schellingian Experiments in Speculation 2. Vitality or Weakness? On the Place of Nature in Recent Materialist Philosophy 3. Lamps, Rainbows and Horizons: Spatializing Knowledge in Naturphilosophical Epistemology 4. Space Philosophy: Schelling and the Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century 5. Nature’s Capacities: Schelling and Contemporary Power-Based Ontologies 6. The Parallax of Individuation: Simondon and Schelling 7. Naturalism and Symbolism 8. Schelling’s Shadow: Merleau-Ponty’s Late Concept of Nature 9. Is the Late Schelling Still Doing Nature- Philosophy? 10. Against Kant: Toward an Inverted Transcendentalism or a Philosophy of the Doctrinal 11. On the Possibility of Speculative Ethical Absolutes after Kant: Returning to Schelling through the Frailties of Meillassoux and Badiou

Tyler Tritten is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University, USA, and his most recent book is The Contingency of Necessity: Reason and God as Matters of Fact (2017).Daniel Whistler is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Liverpool, UK, and author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language (2013).