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Dustin McWherter - Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling
"Dustin McWherter - Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling" belongs to Grant's nature-philosophy line, where Schelling, world, and transcendental speculation reframe the archive through cosmology rather than cybernetic meltdown.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they give the archive a different philosophical afterlife from Brassier's rationalist critique. Grant reopens nature, world, and Schelling as live speculative resources rather than treating modernity as exhausted by capital or nihilism.
The mechanism is transcendental and cosmological at once. Nature is treated as productive, self-differentiating, and conceptually generative, so philosophy becomes a way of tracking world-process rather than merely critiquing representation.
That matters because the site needs to distinguish Grant's nature philosophy from both CCRU accelerationism and speculative-realist branding. This cluster keeps visible a cosmological branch of the afterlife that would otherwise be flattened into generic realism.
How to read this text
Read first for how nature or world is being defined before moving into the denser speculative vocabulary around it.
Track where Schelling, cosmology, or transcendental argument stop being historical reference and become live conceptual machinery.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
49 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 4 4 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 2 0 0 7 ) Absolute naturalism Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, Continuum, London and New York, 2006. xi + 232 pp., £65.00 hb., 0 8264 7902 2. whether or not materiality is reducible to corporeality.
Definition · paragraph 1
49 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 4 4 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 2 0 0 7 ) Absolute naturalism Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, Continuum, London and New York, 2006. xi + 232 pp., £65.00 hb., 0 8264 7902 2. whether or not materiality is reducible to corporeality. For Grant, somatic theories of matter, such as those adopted by Aristotle and Kant, rarely fail to reveal their complicity with the practicist agenda.
Definition · paragraph 4
Thus the expository incompleteness and hyper-periodization characteristic of previous commentariesʼ presentations of Schelling are merely symptoms of a reluctance to accept the nature-philosophyʼs fundamental status. Accordingly, the majority of Grantʼs engagement with rival secondary literature focuses on its evaluations of the nature-philosophyʼs significance (e.g. whether it is depicted as an autonomous ontological enterprise or a mere extension of transcendentalism).
Definition · paragraph 2
Crucially, this autonomy entails an absolute in irrecuperable excess of human thought and perception (as the time- scales involved in natural geneses make clear), and so Schellingianism at its best is powerfully presented as an anti-anthropocentric metaphysical realism which affirms natureʼs full independence of any cognitive relation to it. At other times, though, Grant seems to oscillate between construing ideation as a regionalized natural phenomenon and as Platonic Ideas universal- ized as ousia.
Definition · paragraph 3
This is a serious obstruction to Grantʼs proposed rehabilitation of metaphysics, and until it is removed he will always be open to the charge that he has yet to engage fully with his most powerful opponent on the latterʼs own terms (despite the meticulousness with which he exposes fatal flaws in Kantʼs attempts at a philosophy of nature). Interestingly, this is one point where Grant and Schelling certainly diverge, as the System of Transcendental Idealismʼs explicitly stated epistemological agenda makes clear.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.