Research

Thesis Abstract:

This thesis sets out to provide a coherent synthesis of the various accounts of intellectual intuition that Schelling furnishes across the major junctures of his corpus. Its purpose is twofold. Firstly, to counter the charge of flippancy, or the belief that Schelling lacked philosophical rigour. While it is true that he provides many seemingly contradictory accounts of intellectual intuition throughout his writings, these contradictions can help reveal rather than obscure its place and purpose within his philosophy. By tracing the various contradictions surrounding intellectual intuition throughout Schelling’s writings I hope to demonstrate the existence of a continuous and unitary philosophical thread. The second purpose of this thesis is to clearly distinguish Schelling’s use of intellectual intuition from Kant’s and Fichte’s. Some significant work has already been done toward this end, but remains incomplete without a conception of intellectual intuition that can hold across Schelling’s entire corpus. The project starts with the period between 1795–1796, right at the beginning of Schelling’s philosophical career where signs of contradiction are already apparent between an original intellectual intuition responsible for positing all reality through itself, and a more quotidian intellectual intuition which attempts to reclaim experiential knowledge of that original act. I then attempt to map this dynamic onto the distinction between aesthetic and intellectual intuition from the 1800 System, and then also the tension present in the Naturphilosophie between a self-constructing nature and the philosopher’s attempts at scientific reconstruction. I consider Schelling’s first explicit attempts to resolve these contradictions in his Identitätssystem before moving on to discuss their persistence in his late “positive philosophy”. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of the possibility and relevance of a so-called “positive” intellectual intuition.

Publications:

• “The World Lost in our Intuition”: A metaphysical reappraisal of the ego-dissolution hypothesis.” Azimuth: 26, 2, (2025): 165-184.
• “Huxley via Schelling: Toward an aesthetic approach to psychedelic experience”, Cosmos and History, 17,3, (2021): 283–298.
• “Mapping the Psyche-Civilization Relationship: How overcoming conceptual dualisms can help us comprehend the trajectory of the human race”, Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 66,4, (2021): 949-968.

Talks:

• “Some Thoughts on Organicism and Technology”, Australasian Association of Philosophy, 2024
• Panel on Schelling’s Method of Construction, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, 2023
• “Schelling and the Philosophical Canon”, Expanding the Canon: History of Philosophy Workshop, The University of Sydney, 2023
• “Excerpts from Clara und Die Weltalter”, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie und ihre Aktualität, Universität Tübingen, 2023
• “The Early Schelling and the Unconditioned”, North American Schelling Society, 2022

Works in Progress:

• “Two Accounts of Intellectual Intuition in Schelling’s Early Philosophy”
• “Principle Minimalism and the Great Chain of Being: Missing links in the development of early modern experimental philosophy”