Abstract

In the eighteenth century, "Natural Philosophy" or the "Philosophy of Nature" were the terms commonly used for all aspects of the investigation of nature. Within its purview were not simply the physical aspects of nature, but also its ethical, religious and political implications; the notion of "natural science" as a value-free, ethically neutral discipline as not yet widely accepted. The failure to appreciate the importance of this distinction has led both historians and scientists to misunderstand the origin of the natural philosophy of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling . This dissertation attempts to correct this deficiency. ;The German universities of the eighteenth century were dominated by professors who ascribed to what may be called the moderate Enlightenment. They used the Newtonian model of nature to support conventional religion, conventional conceptions of morality and the existing political order. Schelling, as a result of his experiences as a student in Tubingen, rejected both Christianity and the monarchical State and sought to establish radical human freedom based on the notions of self-sufficiency, independence and autonomy. Unable to turn to other radical cosmologies, such as materialism and pantheism, because they, too, failed to secure human freedom, Schelling began constructing his own philosophy of nature, based on the philosophies of Kant and Fichte. ;In this natural philosophy, Schelling addresses two of the most pressing issues of the study of nature in the late eighteenth century: the problem of imponderable fluids, such as magnetism, heat, electricity, and light, and the problem of the nature of living things. But in addition, both of his early works of natural philosophy have an underlying political, ethical and theological agenda. Using Leibniz's conception of the monad and Plato's notion of the worldsoul, Schelling developed a model for nature which he used to support a republican polity and an atheistic cosmology