Schelling the philosopher and metaphysics the philosophical enterprise have this in common: when Wolfram Hogrebe’s remarkable 1989 study of Schelling’s tremulous, faltering and unfinished masterwork The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) appeared, both were in general disrepute. How far away Schelling’s biographical philosophical epic of the universe’s autogenesis, violent tumult and all, appeared from philosophy’s modest tasks and shopkeeping! And metaphysics in almost all quarters evoked suspicion and disdain, as if it were an embarrassingly errant concern of a bygone era or a lurking risk over which we had to maintain an upper hand (Heidegger’s Verwindung).

In his blurb for the 2000 translation of the third or 1815 version of The Ages of the World, David Farrell Krell confirmed that the insistence that Schelling’s grand experiment remained critical to philosophy was scandalous. ‘Those who insist that thought be brought under a rule will send this book flying across the room.’ It is not that thought is free of rules, but that to reduce thought to its rules evades a more difficult and, in some sense of the word, properly metaphysical question: how did it come to be subject to any kind of rules? One cannot simply use the rules of thought to explain the rules of thought. ‘Never fear: Schelling’s text will soar on its own, free and daring and daunting’, Krell reassured us.