This translation of Schelling's difficult and densely allusive work provides extensive annotations and translations of a series of texts, hard to find or previously unavailable in English, whose presence in the Philosophical Investigations is unmistakable and highly significant.

Appearing here in English for the first time, this isF.W.J. Schelling's vital document of the attempts of German idealism and Romanticism to recover a deeper relationship between humanity and nature and to overcome the separation between mind and matter induced by the modern reductionist program. Written in 1799 and building upon his earlier work, "First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature provides the most inclusive exposition of Schelling's philosophy of the natural world. He presents a startlingly contemporary model of an expanding and contracting universe; a unified theory of electricity, gravity magnetism, and chemical forces; and, perhaps most importantly, a conception of nature as a living and organic whole.

This is the first English translation of Schelling's novel, most likely written after the death of his first wife, Caroline, the former wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. Although only a fragment, Clara remains unique. Part novella, part philosophical tome, its central theme is the connection between this world and the next. Schelling masterfully weaves together his knowledge of animal magnetism, literary techniques, and his doctrine of the potencies to make his philosophy accessible to all.

Steinkamp addresses the main issues concerning the dating of the work -- many commentators have deemed Clara to be a sketch for Schelling's The Ages of the World or an outline for the third, missing book of that work -- and provides a short biography of Schelling with particular emphasis on events claimed to play a role in the conception of Clara, such as the deaths of both Caroline and her daughter, Auguste. She depicts the striking correspondence between passages in Clara and the content of Schelling's touching letters mourning Caroline, written to Pauline, the daughter of Caroline's best friend and the woman who would become his second wife.

Sets out an ordered system of the arts - music, painting, sculpture, narrative, poetry and tragedy - based on the precepts of German Idealism.

Translated here into English for the first time, F. W. J. Schelling's 1842 lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology are an early example of interdisciplinary thinking. In seeking to show the development of the concept of the divine Godhead in and through various mythological systems (particularly of ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East), Schelling develops the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions. In so doing, he brings together the essential relatedness of the development of philosophical systems, human language, history, ancient art forms, and religious thought. Along the way, he engages in analyses of modern philosophical views about the origins of philosophy's conceptual abstractions, as well as literary and philological analyses of ancient literature and poetry.

The Berlin lectures in The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, appearing here for the first time in English, advance Schelling's final existential system as an alternative to modernity's reduction of philosophy to a purely formal science of reason. His account of the ecstatic nature of existence and reason proved to be decisive for the work of Paul Tillich and Martin Heidegger. Also, Schelling's critique of reason's quixotic attempt at self-grounding anticipates similar criticisms leveled by poststructuralism, but without sacrificing philosophy's power to provide a positive account of truth and meaning. The Berlin lectures provide fascinating insight into the thought processes of one of the most provocative yet least understood thinkers of nineteenth-century German philosophy.