The universe in the universe. German idealism and the natural history of mind

Grant, Iain Hamilton

Abstract

Recent considerations of mind and world react against philosophical naturalisation strategies by maintaining that the thought of the world is normatively driven to reject reductive or bald naturalism. This paper argues that we may reject bald or‘thoughtless’ naturalism without sacrificing nature to normativity and so retreating from metaphysics to transcendental idealism. The resources for this move can be
found in the Naturphilosophie outlined by the German Idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. He argues that because thought occurs in the same universe as thought thinks, it remains part of that universe whose elements in consequence nowadditionally include that thought. A philosophy of nature beginning from such a position
neither shaves thought from a thoughtless nature nor transcendentally reduces nature to the content of thought, since a thought occurring in nature only has ‘all nature’ as its content when that thought is additive rather than summative. A natural history of mind drawn from Schellingian premises therefore entails that, while a thought may have ‘all nature’ as its content, this thought is itself the partial content of the nature augmented by it.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Apr 3, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 15, 2016
• Journal: Philosophy. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement
• Print ISSN: 1358-2461
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 72
• Pages: 297-316
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246113000167
• Keywords: Schelling, german idealism, mind, anture
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/930323
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1358246113000167
• Contract Date: Nov 15, 2016