Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 1775-1854
German philosopher

Born in Leonberg, W�rttemberg, he studied at T�bingen and Leipzig, and taught at Jena (1798-1803, as Johann Fichte's successor), W�rzburg (1803-08), Munich (until 1820, as secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts), Erlangen (1820-27), Munich again (1827-40), and Berlin (1841-46). His early work, influenced by Kant and Fichte, culminated in the Ideen zur einer Philosophie der Natur (1797, Eng trans Idealism and Philosophy of Nature, 1978), and the System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800, 'System of Transcendental Idealism'), which examined the relation of the self to the objective world and argued that consciousness itself is the only immediate object of knowledge and that only in art can the mind become fully aware of itself. He thus became an important influence on romanticism. His later works include Philosophische Untersuchungen �ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809, Of Human Freedom, 1936) and Die Weltalter (1811, The Ages of the World, 1942).