Vittorio Bortolai A. Alves

This paper proposes to retrace Schelling’s early critique of Kant’s construction of Christian religion to the difference between their theories of imagination. First, I will begin by reconstructing Schelling’s early critique of Kant’s reduction of the content of Christian religion to morality. Here, it will become clear that while Schelling, like Kant, takes Christian imagery to be fundamentally symbolic, he puts forth a different conception of symbol from that of Kant, namely one that sustains the intuition of the universe as history. Christian religion, argues Schelling, opens the human to the experience of world history, something he takes Kant to neglect. Finally, I will retrace both authors’ notions of symbolism to their respective interpretations of imagination, and by doing so, elucidate how Schelling speculatively transforms Kant’s concept of imagination, placing it as a central epistemic device in the method of his philosophical theology.

I reconstruct the interplay between two gestures that characterize Sean McGrath’s most recent book, Political Eschatology. First, McGrath develops a thorough genealogy of secular modernity in which he focuses both on the disenchantment of nature brought about by the notion of God as transitive cause of the world, and the importance of an eschatological understanding of time for the modern belief in historical progress. Second, McGrath draws from Schelling’s philosophy of revelation to propose that a truly eschatological conception of time should at once affirm the poverty of human reason in the face of genuine novelty in history, and postulate that redemption and justice are events the sources of which are wholly transcendent to the discursive faculties and spontaneity of human subjectivity. In the last section of this review, I explore the consequences for political and ecological thinking that McGrath draws from his eschatological methodology.