Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom

by Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von; Love, Jeff; Schmidt, Johannes

• ISBN13: 9780791468739
• ISBN10: 0791468739
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-30
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

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 Zizek.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction, Schelling's Treatise on Freedom and the Possibility of Theodicy	ix
Translators' Note	xxxi
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith	1	(84)
Supplementary Texts
Introductory Note	81	(4)
Jacob Boehme: Mysterium Pansophicum or Thorough Report on the Earthly and Heavenly Mysterium	85	(14)
Franz Xaver von Baader: ``On the Assertion That There Can No Wicked Use of Reason''	99	(4)
Ephraim Gotthold Lessing: ``A Parable''	103	(3)
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: From On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn	106	(19)
Johann Gottfried Herder: From God. Some Conversations	125	(6)
Notes	131