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How Nature Comes to be Thought; Schelling's Paradox and the Problem of Location
"How Nature Comes to be Thought; Schelling's Paradox and the Problem of Location" 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Track where Schelling, cosmology, or transcendental argument stop being historical reference and become live conceptual machinery.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 3
1, January 2013 HOW NATURE COMES TO BE THOUGHT: SCHELLING’S PARADOX AND THE PROBLEM OF LOCATION IAIN HAMILTON GRANT As for me, I rather think Nature first produced the things to its own liking and then created human reason.1 In his Predication and Genesis,2 Wolfram Hogrebe reconstructs Schelling’s Ages of the World3 along the lines of a theory of predication, while asking, with Schelling, how it is that predication or judgment comes about.
Definition · paragraph 12
problem of the location or topic of thought with regard to nature’s primals. We will concentrate firstly on the second problem. Having discussed the near-ontological problem of “intelligible matter”, which stems from on the one hand the universality of matter for any materialist philosophy of nature and, on the other, from consequences this has for the predictability or identity criteria of matter itself,35 Schelling moves on to discuss the local behaviour of a material body par excellence, i.e., the animal.
Definition · paragraph 12
problem of the location or topic of thought with regard to nature’s primals. We will concentrate firstly on the second problem.
Definition · paragraph 9
That is, the whole world is thinkable on condition that it is thought precisely as a midpoint of itself, as within the world and therefore as entailing extainment. Yet this account carries with it the risk that thinking nature is wholly extained from the nature being thought.
Definition · paragraph 9
Yet the whole world is not only thinkable, but also, since the localisation of this ‘whole world’ is consequent upon its being a consequent, in the sequences of antecedence and consequence necessitated if there is emergence in nature at all, its being thought is precisely a consequence of the nature so thought.
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.