SPAH Seminar Series Week 3: Professor Peter Dews

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Prof Peter Dews gives a talk about Schelling and Sartre on un-pre-thinkable being

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) concludes with a short chapter which departs from the general phenomenological approach of the book. Sartre tries to provide an account of the original relation between the two basic forms of being (being in-itself and being for-itself) presupposed by his phenomenology, by framing a ‘hypothesis’ concerning the emergence of the for-itself from the in-itself. He terms this conjecture ‘metaphysical’. In this paper I use Sartre’s arguments to illuminate Schelling’s difficult concept of ‘un-pre-thinkable being’ (das unvordenkliche Seyn). The parallels are striking – and it turns out that Schelling has a better grip on the issues involved.

About the speaker:
Peter Dews taught for many years in the School of Philosophy and Art History at Essex, and is now an Emeritus Professor there. He has published widely on the Frankfurt School and on recent French philosophy, and has a particular interest in connections between German Idealism and twentieth-century European thought. His book on the relations between Schelling’s late philosophy and the philosophy of Hegel will be appearing with OUP next year.

To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link. The seminar will also be streamed in the Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall Seminar Room.