Schelling's Naturalism

Using Schelling?s philosophy, Ben Woodard examines how an expanded form of naturalism changes how we conceive of the division between thought and world, mathematics and motion, sense and dynamics, experiment and materiality, as well as speculation and pragmatism. Nature, in Schelling?s eyes, is not the great outdoors or some authentic pastoral realm, but the various powers, processes and tendencies which run through biology, chemistry, physics and the very possibility of thought itself.

A rare piece of philosophising combining exemplary historical sweep with immediate contemporary pertinence. At the heart of this work, an admirable conceptual archaeology of Schelling?s powers ontology provides the foundation for a claim entirely Schellingian in inspiration yet contemporary in orientation; namely that constructionism, the idealism of our age, furnishes not an alternative to the philosophy of nature, but forms the choreography of nature-philosophising just when philosophising consequently forms it.