Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

In this course

Schelling provides the course with a foundational metaphysics of nature as simultaneously productive force and produced object, grounded in opposing polarities that anticipate later systems thinking about emergence and self-organization. His concept of nature's dual character—as both the constraining and enabling conditions for life and thought—appears in the readings to support arguments about vitalism's material obscurity and the non-rational forces (darkness, fungal amorphousness, the inorganic) that resist complete comprehension or computational modeling. Through Schelling, the course engages German Idealism's investment in nature as generative system rather than mere substrate, a move that complicates how contemporary AI and cybernetics imagine their relationship to living, sensing matter.

Mentioned in 2 readings