Meillassoux argues that Kant’s ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being prevents an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. This chapter examines three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. These charges are rejected on the following grounds: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it.

Our understanding of Schelling's internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early "Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism," which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity-that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity's finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem's intractability. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this from the "Letters," which reject Fichte's claim that the Wissenschaftslehre is an unrivalled system. I read Schelling as charging Fichte with misrepresenting a system's livability or commensurability with our finitude. My historical aim is to provide a framework for understanding Schelling's Freiheitsschrift, which argues that a system's liveability depends on its incompleteness or limitation by our finitude. On my reading, Schelling is early and continually committed to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude.

Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition.Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to "hold onto" the same "sense" of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what he calls a "science of reason", which he says cannot prove the absolute's existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility.

In the 1830s, Schelling attributes to Hegel the pretense of constructing a logical system with total justification, as if it were obvious why there is a system or, indeed, anything rational or meaningful at all. The questions of why there is reason or meaning are permutations of the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’. This question is emblematic of Schelling’s Hegel-critique and the source of his claim that reason is not self-justifying, but bounded by something other. What sort of claim is this? I argue that it is the conclusion to a transcendental argument in the Ages of the World, which holds that the past and future are conditions of the possibility of reason. This argument represents the past as the decision to construct a system and the future as the purpose guiding this construction. Schelling’s claim against Hegel that reason is bounded by something other thus results from discovering reason’s inescapable presuppositions.

No abstract