Schelling's popularity as a philosopher is probably due for a rebound. He is associated with other German idealists such as Hegel and Fichte, but his thinking reflects well on the contemporary world. This article is a revision of one first published in 2001 and reflects some of this new resonance. It highlights three major threads: first, a "view of nature that does not restrict nature's significance to what can be established about it in scientific terms," second, "how the thinking subject cannot be fully transparent to itself," and third, a "focus on humankind's relationship to nature." Schelling's is a philosophy that speaks to me: "our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature which has passed through everything, it is precisely just our consciousness... what we call the world, which is so completely contingent both as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be the impression of something which has arisen by the necessity of reason (…) it contains a preponderant mass of unreason."
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