Abstraction: Death by a Thousand Cuts

• Autor(a) principal: Khamis, Diana
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/28015
• topic: Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 1775-1854 - Crítica e interpretação; Naturphilosophie; Abstraction; Potency; Productivity

In the Lectures on the Method of Academic Study in 1802, F.W.J. Schelling warned his listeners against the annihilation of nature. The annihilation he had in mind was not ecological in the usual sense of the word, but an annihilation caused by a certain way of looking at nature – a philosophical annihilation. The issue Schelling had in mind was that of understanding nature as mechanical, or as merely a domain of things, and of understanding humans as somehow more than natural. This paper is set to describe and argue for a Schellingian alternative to the “annihilation” of nature, to demonstrate why, on such an understanding of nature, the only thing which could undermine it is abstraction and to see how a philosophy should approach abstract thinking in order to deal with this apparent problem. For that, diff erent ways to apply the “knife” of abstraction will be then discussed – some murderous, some surgical.