Philosophical Investigations Into The Nature Of Human Freedom

Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt offer a fresh translation of Schelling's enigmatic and influential masterpiece, widely recognized as an indispensable work of German Idealism. The text is an embarrassment of riches—both wildly adventurous and somberly prescient. Martin Heidegger claimed that it was "one of the deepest works of German and thus also of Western philosophy" and that it utterly undermined Hegel's monumental Science of Logic before the latter had even appeared in print. Schelling carefully investigates the problem of evil by building on Kant's notion of radical evil, while also developing an astonishingly original conception of freedom and personality that exerted an enormous (if subterranean) influence on the later course of European philosophy from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Heidegger to important contemporary theorists like Slavoj Zðizûek. This translation of Schelling's notoriously difficult and densely allusive work provides extensive annotations and translations of a series of texts (by Boehme, Baader, Lessing, Jacobi, and Herder), hard to find or previously unavailable in English, whose presence in the Philosophical Investigations is unmistakable and highly significant. This handy study edition of Schelling's masterpiece will prove useful for scholars and students alike.

An exploration of the nature of human freedom, inspired by Jakob Boehme.

Schelling was one of the foremost representatives of German Idealism, the equal of Fichte and Hegel. This is the only translation into English of one of his most important works.

This volume comprises the lecture course that Heidegger gave in 1941 on the metaphysics of German Idealism. The first part of the lecture course contains a preliminary consideration of the distinction between ground and existence. The elucidation of the conceptual history includes a striking confrontation with Kierkegaard’s and Jaspers’ concepts of existence, as well as an elucidation of the concept of existence in Being and Time, which Heidegger distinguishes from the former concepts. Heidegger’s self-interpretation is not an end in itself, however, but rather a way of pointing to Schelling’s distinction between ground and existence, whose root and inner necessity and whose various versions Heidegger discusses subsequently. The second part of the lecture course is focused on Schelling’s “freedom treatise,” which Heidegger regards as the pinnacle of the metaphysics of German Idealism. Heidegger’s consideration of Schelling’s distinction between ground and existence finds its guiding thread in the introduction of the realms of being – eternal or finite, each being is a joining of the ground of existence and existence itself. In a subsequent overview, Heidegger discusses the relation of the distinction between ground and existence to the essence of human freedom and to the essence of the human. On the basis of this discussion, it becomes possible to grasp the connection between freedom and evil in Schelling’s system. This important work by Heidegger, published here in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger’s work.

In this thought-provoking work, philosopher John Williamson Nevin delves into the nature of human freedom and the role that philosophy plays in shaping our understanding of it. With engaging and accessible writing, Nevin makes a compelling argument for the importance of philosophical inquiry in our lives. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.