ABSTRACT
The later Schelling’s significance in the history of philosophy depends on reasons for his critique of Hegel. Modern accounts of Schelling’s critique, which really got under way in the 1950s with Walter Schulz’s new approach to the later Schelling, are faced with the task of trying to give an account of Hegel and of Schelling that does justice to both. Schelling is concerned to show that consciousness attributes the world to its own activity when in fact it is the prior activity of the world that is consciousness’s condition of possibility. Schelling understands the Socratic docta ignorantia by the fact of the movement of knowledge, in which, as in Hegel, there is constant change’. In the Hegelian conception the knowledge which reveals the truth of the beginning at end is truth of what at the beginning was ‘immediate’, and, importantly, knows it is that truth. The project of Schelling’s later philosophy is to make Christianity into a philosophically viable religion.
