Ljudevit Fran Ježić

The paper reintroduces and reinforces Fuhrmans’ thesis that Schelling’s Freedom Essay was mostly occasioned by critical remarks of Friedrich Schlegel and ‘Schlegel’s party’, not by those of Hegel or Jacobi. It aims to demonstrate this both from Schelling’s correspondence and from many passages of the Freedom Essay itself, and to contribute to a better contextual reading of the Freedom Essay through an exploration of its intertextual relations, whether they are already known or as yet unidentified. It advocates the reading of the Freedom Essay as a polemical work and apologia of Schelling’s system as well as his personal integrity, which could explain concealed motives behind its systematic novelties. The paper expounds four lines of apologetic argumentation in the Freedom Essay which reveal why and how Schelling moved towards the topics and positions of his late philosophy.

In diesem Aufsatz wird die teils offene, teils versteckte und deshalb in der Schellingforschung vernachlässigte Diskussion zwischen Schlegel und Schelling dokumentiert und analysiert, die nach dem Gipfel ihres öffentlichen Streits von 1808 bis 1809 in Briefen, Buchbesprechungen, veröffentlichten Werken und posthum veröffentlichten Manuskripten stattgefunden hat. Es wird an den Texten gezeigt, dass sowohl Friedrich Schlegel als auch sein Bruder August Wilhelm wichtige Gesprächspartner Schellings waren und dass ihre philosophischen, philologischen und historischen Arbeiten Schellings Hinwendung zu seiner eigenen späten, ›positiven‹ Philosophie der Mythologie und Offenbarung stark angeregt haben. Dieses Gespräch ist schon in der Freiheitsschrift leicht nachzuweisen, weil Friedrich Schlegels Indienbuch und seine versteckt polemischen Rezensionen dort deutliche Spuren hinterließen. In dieser Schrift integrierte Schelling zum ersten Male den von Schlegel geforderten Dualismus in seinen monistischen Pantheismus, indem er Freiheit als Vermögen zum Guten und zum Bösen definierte.

Although it generally holds that Giambattista Vico was almost never mentioned in Germany during the heyday of German idealism, there is an important exception to this general statement. As he happened to be acquainted with Vico’s early work De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi made interesting use of a passage from this book in his Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (1811), which is famous for its polemical tone towards Schelling’s system. He here indicates that Kant’s central insight that we concieve an object only insofar as we are able to construct it in our thoughts (as is the case in geometry as opposed to metaphysics) had been formulated in Italy “long before Kant” in Vico’s work, as well as in France in the work of Pascal. The paper will examine this curious comparison between Vico and Kant and the role it might have played in its original context.

The paper explores the relationship of language and thought with respect to their mutual determination or influence. Two questions are considered crucial: how do we learn the meanings of conventional linguistic signs, including those for abstract concepts, and how do we express our original insights, thoughts and feelings through not-yet-conventional linguistic means. These are followed by succinct answers and extensive elaborations referring to opposite views and linguistic examples from the history of philosophy and cognitive linguistics. It is argued that linguistic expressions, including metaphors, mostly incorporate how people represent (or once represented) the world to themselves through imagination and present (or once presented) the world to others through language. Hence language neither directly shows how we conceive and understand the world nor how we construct it in our thoughts. On the other hand, symbolization through metaphor and metonymy, as well as innovative verbalization, enable our cognition to communicate novel as well as abstract and philosoph­ically demanding meanings.

Sažetak Da postoji neka malena recenzija čuvene „Kritike čistoga uma“, na koju se Kant osjećao primoran tako odgovoriti da se od početka do kraja svojih „Prolegomena za svaku buduću metafiziku“ stalno s njome razračunava, moglo bi biti poznato boljiim poznavaocima Kantovih spisa, no bit će manje poznato da je ta recenzija – Göttingenska recenzija – ujedno dala povoda da se Kant javno postavi nasuprot onodobnoj filozofiji s kojom je njegova u više važnih pogleda bila srodna, naime škotskoj filozofiji zdravoga razuma. U ovome se članku istražuje u kojem se kontekstu to suočenje odvijalo. Zusammenfassung Dass es eine kleine Recension der berühmten „Kritik der reinen Vernunft“ gibt, auf die Kant sich genötigt fühlte, so zu antworten, dass er seine „Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik“ hindurch stetig mit ihr auseinandersetzt, könnte den besseren Kennern der kantischen Schriften bekannt sein, aber dass diese Recension – die Göttinger Recension – zugleich veranlasst hatte, dass Kant sich der damaligen Philosophie, mit der die seinige in mehreren wichtigen Hinsichten verwandt ist, nämlich der schottischen Philosophie des Common-Sense, öffentlich gegenüberstellte, ist vielleicht weniger bekannt. In dieser Aufsatz wird untersucht, in welchem Kontext es geschah.