“Schelling and the Frankfurt School” Frankfurt am Main, June 16-17, 2025

Abstract

This report offers a summary and critical reflections on the two-day workshop “Schelling and the Frankfurt School,” held in Frankfurt on June 16–17, 2025, and co-organized by Martin Saar, Kyla Bruff, and Tobias Heinze. Five presentations explored intersections between Schelling’s philosophy and key figures of the Frankfurt School, followed by a panel discussion and two reading workshops on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics1 and Schelling’s Freedom Essay.2 Across sessions, participants explored questions of aesthetics, ecology, materialism, psychoanalysis, social philosophy, and freedom, revealing both convergences and divergences that point toward new research directions.

Keywords: aesthetics, critical theory, ecology, ecophilosophy, freedom, materialism, mimesis, naturphilosophie, negative dialectics, speculative philosophy