Discredited in his time, Lamarck's 18th- and 19th-century research appears to have been closer to the mark than many would have guessed. Typically remembered solely for his theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, many of Lamarck's other ideas, particularly those about the mechanism that drives evolution, are beginning to garner more attention. Highlighted in this work is Lamarck's central evolutionary claim that more than simply providing a backdrop for evolution, the environment plays a vital role in the development of biodiversity.

    The text is an embarrassment of riches both wildly adventurous and somberly prescient. Martin Heidegger claimed that it was "one of the deepest works of German and thus also of Western philosophy" and that it utterly undermined Hegel's monumental Science of Logic before the latter had even appeared in print. Schelling carefully investigates the problem of evil by building on Kant's notion of radical evil, while also developing an astonishingly original conception of freedom and personality that exerted an enormous (if subterranean) influence on the later course of European philosophy from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Heidegger to important contemporary theorists like Slavoj Žižek.