Continental Philosophy Research Group (Thimo Heisenberg, Rice University)

The Continental Philosophy Research Interest Group welcomes guest speaker Thimo Heisenberg, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University.

Professor Heisenberg is a specialist in 19th and 20th century German Philosophy. Having earned his PhD from Columbia in 2019, his work has appeared in journals such as the British Journal of the History of Philosophy, the European Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, and the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, as well as in many edited collections and anthologies. He was a Fulbright Scholar, and has received fellowships from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, the German National Academic Foundation, the Max Weber Program and from Columbia University. His book, The Economy in German Idealism, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Talk Title

The Dream Allegory in Schelling’s Denkmal

Talk Abstract

The final section of Schelling’s 1812 Denkmal is its most unusual. While the rest of the text had presented a philosophical critique of Jacobi and Jacobianism, this third part offers a satirical Dream Allegory showing a fictional Jacobi on an absurd journey. Because of this unconventional form, commentators have largely avoided this part of the text or dismissed it as unserious. Yet, even though this is rarely noted, Schelling himself insists on the allegory’s importance: telling us that it is only here that his critique of Jacobi finds “proper completion” (AA I 18, 188) and even that it does the “best work” (AA I 18, 144). In this regard, unless we want to dismiss these remarks too, we need to attend to the allegory and its role in Schelling’s argument. This is what I will do in this talk. I will argue that, rightly interpreted, the allegory does indeed bring Schelling’s critique of Jacobi to completion and culmination:  rounding out Schelling’s well-known critique of Jacobi’s principles with a much less well-known (but motivationally even more powerful) critique of the life those principles lead us to live, if we adopt them as our own.