This project, funded by the DFG, analyses Schelling's unfinished system from his late philosophy. The aim of the project is to explain its systematically incongruous form in the context of a post-Kantian metaphysics. A clear outline of the final system will emerge in a "virtual image" reconstructed by means of philosophical analyses.
The project analyzes Schelling’s unfinished system as it presents itself in its final form—fundamentally revised by Schelling himself during his final years in Berlin up until the year of his death in 1854, and affirmed by him as his philosophical testament. The systematic structure envisioned by Schelling, consisting of the “Philosophy of Mythology” and the “Philosophy of Revelation,” may be called “unfinished” in two respects: first, he was unable to complete the planned elaboration in its entirety, and merely indicated parts of it in separate supplementary documents, some of which have remained unnoticed to this day; second, the systematically intended form of the project explicitly includes open-ended and structurally fractured elements within the system itself.
The revised systematic form has thus far received little attention in scholarship because the posthumous edition of this programmatic work partly obscured its systematic-philosophical features out of misunderstanding, and partly sought—through well-intentioned editorial interventions aimed at a falsely homogenizing presentation for the contemporary public—to render them nearly invisible.
The aim of the project is to explain this systematically fractured form within the context of a post-Kantian metaphysics, highlighting its innovative philosophical motives and methods that point beyond the idealist epoch. The clear and carefully considered contours of Schelling’s revised final system are to be made visible as a critically consistent proposal concerning the possibility of both general and special metaphysics on the path toward twentieth-century thought.