Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and influential of German philosophers. In this book, S. J. McGrath not only makes Schelling's ideas accessible to a general audience, he uncovers the romantic philosopher's seminal role as the creator of a concept which shaped and defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century the concept of the unconscious. McGrath shows how the unconscious originally functioned in Schelling's philosophy as a bridge between nature and spirit. Before Freud revised the concept to fit his psychopathology, the unconscious was understood largely along Schellingian lines as primarily a source of creative power. Schelling's life-long effort to understand intuitive and non-reflective forms of intelligence in nature, humankind and the divine has been revitalised by Jungians, as well as by archetypal and trans-personal psychologists. With the new interest in the unconscious today, Schelling's ideas have never been more relevant. The Dark Ground of Spirit will therefore be essential reading for those involved in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and philosophy, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of ideas.

From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world.In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principles—plenitude, continuity, and graduation—which were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.

This classic study by the eminent scholar Wilhelm Worringer connects the Gothic style with the civilization that produced the art that defined that period in Western European cultural history.

A history of the relationship between art and geometry in the early modern period.

In The Polyhedrists, Noam Andrews unfolds a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern Europe, told largely through a collective of ground-breaking artisan-artists (among them, Luca Pacioli, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Lorentz Stöer) and by detailed analysis of a rich visual panoply of their work, featuring paintings, prints, decorative arts, cabinetry, and lavishly illustrated treatises. But this is also an art history of the polyhedra themselves, emblems of an evolving artistic intelligence, which include a varied set of geometrical figures--both Platonic, or regular, like the simple tetrahedron, and Archimedean, or irregular, like the complex yet beguiling rhombicosidodecahedron.

Moreover, The Polyhedrists argues that the geometrical depictions of Dürer, Jamnitzer et al. were far more than mere follies from the dawn of perspective, at odds with a contemporary view of the Renaissance, and destined to be superseded by later developments in higher level mathematics. In fact, the evolution of the solids into innumerable "irregular bodies" constituted a sustained moment in the formulation of Renaissance mathematical knowledge and its engagement with materiality. This intense field of experimentation would birth a new language of geometrical abstraction that would ignite a century of novel form-making strategies, ultimately paving the way for developments in geometry and topology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even prefiguring the more recent digital turn. The book, in this sense, is not just an applied history of geometry, nor a particular geometric reading of early modern art through some of its more celebrated practitioners, but a manifesto of sorts into the hitherto unexplored wilds of art and science.