NDPR Peter Dews Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.01.15 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Peter Dews, Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel, Oxford University Press, 2023, 344pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780190069124.

Reviewed by Kyla Bruff, Carleton University

Questions concerning the differences between Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophical systems have always been of intense interest. This has been the case since Hegel decisively ended their friendship and collaboration by critically describing the early Schelling’s concept of the Absolute (the identity of identity and non-identity, or A=A [Dews, 75–76]) as the night “in which all cows are black” in the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 (Hegel 1977, 9, cf. Dews 75). Schelling’s Absolute, on Hegel’s account, was an abyss of darkness within which the dynamic development of real difference did not emerge. In contrast, Hegel thought his own dialectical system...