V. V. BIBIKHIN ON PHILOSOPHY OF F. W. J. SCHELLING

Annotation

In my article I analyze the interpretation of the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling, proposed by V. V. Bibikhin in his course “History of Modern Philosophy”. To be more precise, I highlight three main lines in this interpretation. Firstly, this is Bibikhin’s reading of the early philosophy of the German classic, above all, his understanding of Schelling’s transcendental idealism and Naturphilosophie, as well as the problem of their relationship. Secondly, I reconstruct Bibikhin’s treatment of the relationship between Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies. Thirdly, I consider Bibikhin’s interpretation of Schelling’s doctrine of freedom as well as the theological consequences of it. In conclusion, I generalize the main features of the Bibikhin’s reception of Schelling’s philosophy as a whole. I find that he reproduces many standard schemes of historiographic evaluation of Schelling’s legacy, but fills them with his own unique content. In his interpretation, Schelling is a lonely genius who tried to transpose his personal experience, realized in the sphere of intuition, immersed in the “impenetrable cloud of the unconscious”, who disclosed a “scope” (“razmakh”) for the future philosophies (Hegel, Schopenhauer). In contrast, I believe that the matter is to learn to see Schelling as a proper philosophical thinker.

Keywords

natural philosophy, transcendental idealism, German classical philosophy, philosophy of identity, freedom as the basis of all philosophy, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, V. V. Bibikhin

Literature

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The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation № 25–28–01497,
https://rscf.ru/en/project/25–28–01497/; Russian Christian Academy for Humanities named after
Fyodor Dostoevsky