Schelling's incomplete system

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Buchheim
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464064048

The research project aims at uncovering and philosophically elucidating the profound – yet hitherto largely concealed – revision, beginning in 1846 (in Berlin), of Schelling’s late philosophy, which he had previously developed and taught in lectures for over two decades, without himself ever publishing it. That revision resulted in a strongly amended, decisively enlarged and at many pivotal points reworked program for a systematic, yet critically thought out post-Kantian metaphysics. According to Schelling's testament, this program constitutes the only valid expression of the systematic-philosophical objectives he had developed over decades and laid down in the almost 2000 pages of his philosophical investigations of Mythology and Revelation. Though remaining unfinished as a whole and being played out not in only one system, but over several, methodically brought about and again bridged system refractions, these investigations nonetheless form a systematically progressing architecture that pursues the goals of general and special metaphysics – an architecture which can therefore in a double sense be referred to as "Schelling's incomplete system": first, because it was not ultimately brought to publishable form by Schelling himself; and second, because of its well-founded but intrinsically open-ended claim to knowledge. Until now, this far-reaching revision has remained largely unknown to scholarship, because the only edition of Schelling's works, compiled primarily by his son Karl Friedrich August (KFA), mixes pre- and post-revision parts of Schelling's late philosophy, unmarked and in part contrary to Schelling's testamentary stipulations. This mixed form can no longer be definitively unraveled by a new critical edition of the texts, since almost all original manuscript drafts have been destroyed. However, through precise philosophical analysis and comparative work drawing on all possible textual parallels and documents, the intellectual contours of the revision can be made visible throughout the components of the work cycle and brought to philosophically clear awareness – as is precisely the main goal of this research project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants