Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt offer a fresh translation of Schelling's enigmatic and influential masterpiece, widely recognized as an indispensable work of German Idealism. The text is an embarrassment of riches—both wildly adventurous and somberly prescient. Martin Heidegger claimed that it was "one of the deepest works of German and thus also of Western philosophy" and that it utterly undermined Hegel's monumental Science of Logic before the latter had even appeared in print. Schelling carefully investigates the problem of evil by building on Kant's notion of radical evil, while also developing an astonishingly original conception of freedom and personality that exerted an enormous (if subterranean) influence on the later course of European philosophy from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Heidegger to important contemporary theorists like Slavoj Zðizûek. This translation of Schelling's notoriously difficult and densely allusive work provides extensive annotations and translations of a series of texts (by Boehme, Baader, Lessing, Jacobi, and Herder), hard to find or previously unavailable in English, whose presence in the Philosophical Investigations is unmistakable and highly significant. This handy study edition of Schelling's masterpiece will prove useful for scholars and students alike.

Schelling was one of the foremost representatives of German Idealism, the equal of Fichte and Hegel. This is the only translation into English of one of his most important works.

An exploration of the nature of human freedom, inspired by Jakob Boehme.

This volume comprises the lecture course that Heidegger gave in 1941 on the metaphysics of German Idealism. The first part of the lecture course contains a preliminary consideration of the distinction between ground and existence. The elucidation of the conceptual history includes a striking confrontation with Kierkegaard’s and Jaspers’ concepts of existence, as well as an elucidation of the concept of existence in Being and Time, which Heidegger distinguishes from the former concepts. Heidegger’s self-interpretation is not an end in itself, however, but rather a way of pointing to Schelling’s distinction between ground and existence, whose root and inner necessity and whose various versions Heidegger discusses subsequently. The second part of the lecture course is focused on Schelling’s “freedom treatise,” which Heidegger regards as the pinnacle of the metaphysics of German Idealism. Heidegger’s consideration of Schelling’s distinction between ground and existence finds its guiding thread in the introduction of the realms of being – eternal or finite, each being is a joining of the ground of existence and existence itself. In a subsequent overview, Heidegger discusses the relation of the distinction between ground and existence to the essence of human freedom and to the essence of the human. On the basis of this discussion, it becomes possible to grasp the connection between freedom and evil in Schelling’s system. This important work by Heidegger, published here in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger’s work.

This dissertation is a study of F.W.J. Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. It focuses in particular on the Kantian themes of autonomy and the primacy of the practical as they are developed by Schelling. It is argued that Schelling, following Kant, gives primacy to the practical and thereby attempts to demonstrate that human existence unfolds within a metaphysical order of the whole. He does this by means of an analysis of human freedom (the ability to choose between good and evil by Schelling's definition), which he sees as the conduit through which we gain awareness of our moral and ontological role within the process of reality. In other words, Schelling recognizes that, through our practical existence as free beings, human beings are self-consciously aware of participating in (if not fully grasping) an overarching reality that precedes any individual's existence. Schelling thus develops Kant's argument for the primacy of practical reason into an argument for the primacy of existence, or freedom, and, from that perspective, he shows that human freedom, or autonomy, articulates our awareness of our participation with full personal responsibility in a universal moral order that transcends the self and demands our assent as moral agents. In other words, Schelling offers a new and profound analysis of what it means to be free that captures a balance between the modern emphasis on individual freedom and the need to recognize that we are always already subject to inescapable moral obligations.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the sciences and the concept of divine revelation. It includes a historical overview of the notion of revelation, its role in scientific debates over the centuries, and current challenges in light of non-religious and especially non-revelational proposals. The volume emphasizes that discussions of divine revelation cannot be limited to theology alone but must also involve scientific and philosophical approaches. The contributions examine methodological, ethical, and theoretical questions related to the sciences. The main argument is that divine revelation not only played a historical role in shaping our understanding of knowledge but is also present in contemporary scientific endeavours and will continue to be important in the future. Divine revelation is considered to be a critical element of human existence that cannot be avoided in any scientific context. The book will be relevant to scholars of theology and philosophy, particularly those interested in religion and science.

In Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short. The result is an erudite and insightful analysis—in his usual lively and masterful style—of several key "spectral" figures from medieval angelology and Eckhart's Gottheit, through Luther's deus absconditus and Schelling's "Satanology," to the spectralization and virtualization of the world in the "posthuman" age. Arguing that the name of God is not the master name of a super-being who is going to save us but a placeholder for sources deep in our apophatic imaginary, he asks, Has "God" become a (holy) ghost of the past? A passing spectral effect of the ancient harmonies of the spheres? Does radical thinking culminate in a cosmopoetics beyond theism and its theology, in a doxology to the transient glory of the world, whatever it was in the beginning, however eerie its end, world without why?