ABSTRACT
Schelling’s early writings on Naturphilosophie, unlike his later philosophical writings, have recently received a good deal of attention in both English and German. The vital factor which has sustained the actuality of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is its refusal to see the thinking subject as simply opposed to nature as a world of objects, because the subject is itself part of nature. In her account of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Marie-Luise Heuser-Kessler makes an important distinction between ‘self-organisation’ and ‘self-reproduction’: the latter may be explicable in the terms of Kant’s First Critique, the former is not. Theories of evolutionary epistemology are open to precisely the arguments against explaining the emergence of life and intelligibility by mechanical processes that the people have already considered in both Kant and Schelling. The contemporary correlate of evolutionary epistemology is the contrary tendency, which turns nature in itself into something mystical and incomprehensible.
