SCHELLING (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von).
System des transscendentalen Idealismus.
Schelling's 'Naturphilosophie'
A key text in the development of German idealism, this was Schelling’s most systematic and mature exposition of his Naturphilosophie, published seven years after Fichte’s Foundations of the Science of Knowledge (1794-95) and seven years before Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Through Coleridge, Schelling’s influence (and particularly that of this book) on the English romantics was considerable.
‘The model presented in the System impresses not least because, at the same time as establishing the notion of the history of self-consciousness that would be decisive for Hegel, it offers, in a manner which goes beyond its sources in Fichte, a model of the relationship between the subject and its conceptually inaccessible motivating forces which would affect significant parts of nineteenth century thought from Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche, to Freud’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Provenance: from the library of the statesman Wilhelm Ludwig Leopold Freiherr von Berstett (1769-1837), with his elegant bookplate and manuscript inventory number to inside front cover.
Schneeberger 58.
