Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling - Periodisation

Periodisation

Schelling at all stages of his thought he called to his aid outward forms of some other system. Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the mystics, and finally, major Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give colouring to particular works. In Schelling's own view, his philosophy fell into three stages. These were:

1. the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature i.e. the advance to Naturphilosophie
2. the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, that is, the thought of the identical, indifferent, absolute substratum of both nature and spirit, the advance to Identitätsphilosophie
3. the opposition of negative and positive philosophy, an opposition which is the theme of his Berlin lectures, though its germs may be traced back to 1804.