Volume 73, Issue 6

For the socio-ecological transformation to gain social acceptance, it is necessary to keep the threshold for entry as low as possible. On the one hand, social conditions must undergo fundamental change, but on the other hand, little should change. Hegel’s critique of reason can help resolve this dilemma. According to Hegel, modern rationalisation processes lead to social contradictions and are at the same time capable of resolving these contradictions. In the spirit of a critique of ecological reason, Hegel’s critique of reason should be used to explain social change towards sustainability. For this purpose, the article will focus on property rights. It argues that property rights can both drive ecological crises and resolve them if their own normative foundations are turned against them.

This article discusses the debate between Schelling and Hegel from 1811 to 1820. It considers Schelling’s Ages of the World on which he worked during this period as a counter-concept to the speculative logic presented by Hegel in his Science of Logic , first published in 1812. In contrast to Hegel, Schelling attempts in the first book of The Ages of the World to develop a logic that is both onto-logic and theo-logic and also follows the primacy of the will. According to this view, all conceptual relationships arise from volitional relationships of God or the Absolute. Apart from this difference, Schelling adheres to Hegel’s stage sequence of logic, moving from considerations of being and non-being, to becoming, and finally to something. This article illustrates and traces these stages on the basis of previously unpublished fragments of Schelling’s Ages of the World .

The article reconstructs the ‘debate about method’ between Schelling and Hegel, focusing on Schelling’s late critique, and placing this dispute in the context of early idealist debates. In so doing, the article makes the case that the late confrontation between Schelling and Hegel may only be properly understood in relation to their shared starting point, namely, their early attempts at putting forward an all-encompassing system of philosophy, as well as the methodological difficulties entailed therein. The first section outlines general perspectives on the debate between Schelling and Hegel, highlighting its ‘historial’ significance (in terms of Geschichtlichkeit ). The second section turns to Schelling’s charge against Hegel, according to which the latter is supposed to have outright ‘stolen’, but at the same time ‘misused’ Schelling’s method. The third section places this charge in the earlier German idealist context, focusing on the ‘histories of self-consciousness’ and Hegel’s notion of negativity, thus highlighting the background of the later disagreement.

This article considers the way in which Schelling’s late philosophy implies a re-evaluation of the broader project of German idealism. Schelling’s last negative philosophy (in the Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie ) is designed as a purely rational science which must exhaust itself. Schelling recurs to Kant to both show the indispensability of the purely rational endeavour and at the same time reveal what is excluded from that project. In this sense, Schelling’s last negative philosophy implies a re-framing of his own early philosophy and of the broader project of post-Kantian German idealism. Specifically, Schelling’s late reading of Kant’s transcendental Ideal sheds light on Schelling’s re-framing of the project of a science of pure reason and illuminates how Schelling’s late system, with its transition from negative to positive philosophy, does not reject the unity of thinking and being, but radically transforms it.