In this concluding chapter I demonstrate how Schelling's emphasis on motion and space, coupled with his particular mode of philosophical speculation, leads to a form of proto-pragmatism. I work out this pragmatism via Schelling's 1821 Erlangen lecture (‘On the Nature of Philosophy as a Science’) by moving through the connections between the great American pragmatist C. S. Peirce and Schelling. I then compare Schelling's proto-pragmatism with the analytic thinkers who have taken German Idealism, in conjunction with the pragmatic legacy of Peirce as well as Sellars, as implying a philosophy that emphasises normativity at the cost of nature, namely McDowell and Brandom (referred to as left Sellarsians or Pittsburgh Hegelians). I close by appealing to the contemporary pragmatist Mark Wilson, who synthesises and operates between the scientific considerations of Peirce and the communicative and practical pragmatism of the Pittsburgh Hegelians. Wilson, through a focus on classical concepts in the physical sciences, demonstrates the limitations of a normative approach to human thought. Specifically with regard to thought, Wilson attempts to argue for a navigational approach to cognition that steers clear of both the normativity of the Pittsburgh Hegelians (or left Sellarsians) as well as the more hard-nosed neuroscientific articulations of consciousness in the work of Daniel Dennett and Patricia and Paul Churchland (categorised as right Sellarsians); the former emphasise reason as sui generis, whereas the latter investigate the impact of the natural sciences arguably at the cost of normativity. Peirce, Sellars and, as I will argue, Schelling, all in their own ways, attempt to construct a philosophy where the division between the capacity to articulate particularly human concerns and the capacity to adequately describe and situate our place in the natural world does not make those two capacities incompatible endeavours.

Abducting intuition: Schelling and Peirce