American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 77, Issue 2, Spring 2003

Schelling’s Original Insight
Schelling on the Ontological Argument and the Task of Philosophy

This paper concerns the way in which the transition from negative to positive philosophy is executed in Schelling’s critique of modern philosophy. Schelling’s original insight is that the transition occurs within negative philosophy by means of a twofold experience within philosophical reflection: (1) recognizing the failure of the idealist project of the conceptual determination of Being, and (2) the reversal of the idealist conception of the relation between concepts and their objects. I argue that Schelling uses a form of the ontological argument, focusing on Anselm’s formula aliquid, quo nihil maius cogitari potest, both in his critique of traditional formulations of the argument and to navigate the transition to positive philosophy.