Schelling’s Literary Estate

Abstract

Since 1849, albeit intermittently, Schelling had been working on writing a testament. This testament did not manage his personal estate but was an “Overview of What Will Be My Literary Estate,” determining which of his unpublished manuscripts were to be published and in what way. Among these unpublished manuscripts were some of the earliest writings from his studies; they were mainly middle, later, and latest works, however, as he had not published anything of greater conspicuity since the Freedom Essay (bibl. 25) in 1809 (with few exceptions, such as the polemic work against Jacobi, F.W.J. Schelling’s Monument to Jacobi’s Work on the Divine Things [F.W.J. Schellings Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen etc. des Herrn Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 1812] and the treatise On the Deities of Samothrace [Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, 1815]).

Keywords: German Idealism, nineteenth-century philosophy, Schelling, testament, system, post-Kantian metaphysics, purely rational philosophy, existence of God, crisis of reason, negative and positive philosophy