Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 597 phase of Reinhold's activities, but the threat of censorship or the destruction of letters kept most of this information out of the extant correspondence. Under threat of prosecution, Reinhold went to Leipzig, where he studied under Platner, and thence to Weimar, where he became assistant to Wieland in editing the TeutscherMerkur and married Wieland's daughter. He was converted to Protestantism by Herder, whose side he took in the controversy over Kant's review of the Ideen. The letters are mostly silent on Reinhold's clandestine political activities and his spiritual development; it is only from the copious notes supplied by the assiduous editors that we are able to follow Reinhold's odyssey from "Aberglaube und Unglaube " (as he wrote Kant, letter no. 66) or "from supernaturalism through materialistic atheism, Leibniz-Wolffianism, and theism, to Humean skepticism" (as he wrote Nicolai, page lo, n. 3). The correspondence is mostly concerned with family affairs and the business of running a literary journal. There is much material for a study of literary practices and literary gossip; the correspondence with Nicolai and Wieland is, from this point of view, the most valuable. This book is a monument to and of Teutonic scholarly thoroughness and erudition , and the excellence of German book-manufacture. The letters are provided with full (to my taste, too full) diplomatic apparatus; most pages are a few lines of text floating on a sea of footnotes; there are wonderfully wide margins, and the book is substantially bound and handsomely illustrated. LEWIS WHITE BECK University of Rochester Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Historisch-kritischeAusgabe. Edited by Hans Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Hermann Krings, and Hermann Zeltner. Ca. 80 volumes. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, i976ff. Series I, Vol. 3: PP. viii + 287. Per volume, ca. DM ~4o,- ($11o.oo). Single volumes ca. DM ~75,- ($x~5.oo). The editors and publishers of the Historical-Critical Edition surely hope that it will be recognized as definitive. When completed in the distant future, it will include all Schelling's works (those he published in Series I, those he did not in Series IlL his letters (Series III), and those of his lectures that have been preserved in students' notes (Series IV). To date, only the first three volumes of Series I have appeared, and of those, I have seen only Volume 3. My examination of it has given me two serious reservations, one concerning how the pages are filled, the other, how they are numbered. Volumes x- 3 of Series I contain what the editors term Schelling's published "student" works, i.e., those appearing in 1794-96. All but one of these works--the five-page "Antikritik," Schelling's response to an early review of "Vom Ich als Prinzip 598 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~3:4 OCTOBER 198 5 der Philosophie"--and two others besides are contained in Volume I of Schelling's "Complete Works," edited by his son and published in 1856-61 ~. Whereas Schelling's son's edition was "complete," Frommann-Holzboog's is "historical -critical," and the history and criticism are responsible for stretching the contents of part of one 48o-page volume into three shorter but much more expensive ones. Volume 3 of Series 1 contains 987 pages, of which Schelling wrote only lo 4. Each of the three works included--"Philosophische Briefe tiber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus" (63 pages), "Neue Deduction des Naturrechts" (36 pages), and "Antikritik " (5 pages)---is preceded by an "Editorial Report" (41 pages for "Briefe," 2o for "Naturrecht," lO for "Antikritik") and followed by "Explanatory Notes" (45, ~, and 5 pages, respectively). The volume also includes four indices (listing works cited or alluded to, places, persons, and subjects), a page concordance (on which more below), and a table of symbols and abbreviations. The new edition thus provides much more than Schelling's works--enough more that the works seem to be buried under the editorial matter. Some of that matter, to be sure, is valuable. The Explanatory Notes (especially for the "Briefe") are particularly helpful; the editors have diligently traced Schelling's often obscure allusions, and have quoted relevant excerpts from other works. The Editorial Reports, on the other hand, contain...