Ben Woodard's book, exemplarily erudite and so not for the faint of heart, guides the reader through all periods of F.W.J. Schelling's thought—a feat important in its own right given the burgeoning Schelling renaissance in the English-speaking philosophical universe. Woodard follows this trajectory not in order to periodize this giant of German philosophy but rather in order to demonstrate the continuity of Schelling's thought through the leitmotiv of naturalism. Schelling's naturalism, however, is not of the sort to which we have become accustomed. As Woodard rightly insists, for Schelling nature is “not some local part of the universe” (1) but instead names the universal (non-local) processes productive of (localized) existence. Thought, Woodard incisively argues, is just one of those local processes. Woodard's task, then, from which he never recoils, is to radically expose the consequences of conceiving thought as natural, as not distinct in kind from nature's other productions.
Accordingly,...