Tübingen, Heerbrandt, 1795.
8vo. Bound with later blank blue wrapper in recent marbled paper covered boards. Original wrappers or blanks pasted on to the blue wrappers, heavily annotated in contemporary hand. Title-page reinforced and with misolouring to inner margin. Dampstain to upper margin of last two leaves, otherwise internally fine. 62 pp.
Rare first edition of Schelling first published work. "When he was 19 years old Schelling wrote his first philosophical work, Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1795; On the Possibility and Form of Philosophy in General), which he sent to Fichte, who expressed strong approval.” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Schelling’s tract was a manifesto for Fichte’s foundationalist programme, an argument for the necessity of founding philosophy of the basis of a single selfevident first principle. There must be one first principle, Schelling argued, because if there were two such principles, there would have to be some higher synthesis of them, which would then be the first principle. Along with J.G. Fichte and Hegel, Schelling ranks as the most influential thinker of German Idealism. He stands in the centre of this most important and influential of philosophical traditions, and with his philosophy of nature, his anti-Cartesian view of subjectivity and his later critique of Hegelian Idealism, Schelling continues to be of the utmost importance to the development of continental philosophy to this day.
Order-nr.: 60405