Iain Hamilton Grant: Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (2006)

‘The whole of modern European philosophy’, wrote F.W.J. Schelling in 1809, ‘has this common deficiency – that nature does not exist for it.’ Despite repeated echoes of Schelling’s assessment throughout the natural sciences, and despite the philosophy of nature recently proposed but not completed by Gilles Deleuze, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling argues that Schelling’s verdict remains accurate two hundred years later. Presenting a lucid account of Schelling’s major works in the philosophy of nature alongside those of his scientific contemporaries who pursued and furthered that work, this book does not simply aim to present Schelling’s extravagant ‘speculative physics’ as an historical episode. Rather, Schelling’s programme is presented as a viable and necessary corrective both to the rejection of metaphysics and the correlative ‘antiphysics’ at the ethical heart of contemporary philosophy.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006
Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy
ISBN 0826479030
232 pages

review (Joseph P. Lawrence)

publisher
google books

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Ray Brassier: Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007)

Nihilism is not an affliction to be overcome, but a vector of intellectual discovery which philosophy should try to push to its ultimate conclusion. Rather than trying to safeguard the experience of meaning-construed as the defining feature of human existence-from the incursions of science, philosophy should strive to demystify it and deploy its considerable speculative resources to facilitate science’s labor of disenchantment. Disregarding the orthodox division between analytic and continental traditions, this book tries to forge a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and speculative realism in contemporary French philosophy.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
ISBN 0230522041, 9780230522046
275 pages

publisher
google books

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