ABSTRACT
The Stuttgart Private Lectures that Schelling developed many of the themes which were incipient in the Freedom essay. Schelling return to the story of Genesis in order to grasp the act of liberty by which the world first came into being. Schelling made a specific attack on the inherent authoritarianism of 'the French Revolution and Kantian concepts' - a conjunction of terms which is music to a conservative ear - and also attacked Fichte for his own despotic political philosophy. Hegel's aims to establish a system in which reason would be totally self-grounding. He wanted philosophy to be a presuppositionless science and wanted to turn Cartesian doubt and Kantian criticism on to the structures of thought itself. The final piece of the jigsaw fell into place in Schelling's discussion of Jacobi. Jacobi had greatly influenced Schelling at the beginning of the century because of his criticism of Spinoza, against whom he directed the familiar charges of atheism and nihilism.
