Schiller’s Philosophical Letters: Naturalising Spirit to Moralise Nature

The paper analyses passages from Schil- ler’s Philosophical Letters, a text that is rarely if at all discussed by philosophers today. There are a num- ber of likely reasons for this neglect, it is an early piece, published in 1786 but composed partly much earlier than this, and it consists mainly of criticism of Schiller’s earlier views. So there appears to be little here by means of positive argument, an im- pression strengthened by the form of the piece, which is a dialogue between two fictional charac- ters, Julius and Raphael, a student and his teacher. The piece is worth attending to however because it contains an interesting thesis concerning the mental and the physical namely, not only that they can co- exist, as in various versions of so-called ‘soft naturalism’, but rather that they must co-exist if we are to have a coherent and realistic view of ethics.