Renovando el canon filosófico. Schiller antes, después y más allá de Kant

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) belongs to that category of authors which can be approached from both a literary and a philosophical angle. His work consists of poetry and novels, but also philosophical dialogues and essays, and his range has always challenged disciplinary distinctions, thus necessarily raising methodological issues. Scholars have yet to agree upon his position within the canon: whereas his role as a leading poet in the late Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism is justly undisputed, his inclusion in the philosophical canon requires a great deal more investigation. Schiller has variously been viewed as a mere philosophical dilettante who owes everything to Kant, or as an independent thinker who challenges Kant on equal terms, and these two different attitudes have obviously led to similarly different views on his role in the canon. Be that as it may, the only writings of his to have received scholarly attention are those relating to Kant’s work, which he composed and published in the 1790s. Hence the conviction that Schiller as a philosopher exists only in virtue of Kant. The aim of this paper is to question this thesis by showing the depth of Schiller’s early philosophy and pointing to the continuity of his concerns before, after and beyond Kant.