Born in Leonberg, a small town of Würtemberg in Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Von Schelling (1775-1854) was educated first at the cloister school where his father was chaplain and professor and then at the theological seminary at Tübingen, where he studied Spinoza, Kant, and especially Fichte. There he met and befriended fellow student G.W.F. Hegel, with whom he edited a philosophy journal. In 1798 he was invited to become philosophy professor at the famous university of Jena by its rector, the duke Charles Augustus; three years later Hegel joined the illustrious department that included Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Schiller. Although his transcendental form of idealism clearly owes much to Kant, Fichte and Hegel, Schelling's greatest original contribution was to romanticism, the 18th and 19th century philosophical movement opposed to both rationalism and empiricism. Reacting against both continental rationalism and British Empiricism, Schelling's philosophy centers on the self, transcendentalism, and the power of imagination and art. Generally regarded as the leading romantic of the period, Schelling inspired the great English romantic poets, including Wordsworth and Shelley through the writings of Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834).

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)