Volume 2, Issue 3

The minutiae of F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie have been perennially dismissed due to its allegedly infeasible and indefensible assertions about Nature, such as his designation of Nature as “universal organism.” In the realm of post-Kantian German Idealism, such a dismissive attitude toward Schelling’s so-called objective idealism , more often than not, develops itself along the lines of Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s conception of the Absolute (i.e., as static, fixed, undifferentiated, dull, and so on). In turn, I aim to accomplish two tasks in the following investigation. First, I intend to clarify Schelling’s characterization of Nature as universal organism through a practical or teleological, instead of a theoretical or metaphysical, approach. Second, I seek to undermine the Hegelian-influenced criticisms of Schelling’s “Absolute” by demonstrating the ways in which the practico-teleological characterization of Schelling’s formulation of Nature extends into his later philosophical works (i.e., his Identitätsphilosophie and his Freiheitsschrift ). Through these clarifications, I hope to emphasize the uniqueness and richness of Schelling’s configuration of Nature.

The aim of the paper is to provide a relational explanation of the sources of moral normativity, within a Neo-Kantian framework. To this purpose, the key notions employed are those of we-society and stance-taking, developed by Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. Specifically, by resorting to such notions, the paper attempts to overcome two limits ascribed to the theory of moral normativity of Ch. Korsgaard: namely W. Smith’s objection of solipsism and S. Crowell’s problem of non-deliberate action, whereby Ch. Korsgaard’s identification of the source of normativity in reflection would lead her theory to a form of solipsism and to failing to explain actions based on so-called ‘mindless coping’. In tackling these objections, the paper outlines a Rickertian inspired theory, according to which the sources of moral normativity can be explained on the basis of the heterological I-You relationship, which is the foundation of the we-society intended as a set of values, patterns of expectations, tacit consents, and procedural knowledge.