Schelling and the Priority of Philosophy to Art Abstract In his early wrings up unto his so-called "middle period" Schelling treats art as having a crucial role with respect to philosophy. Yet there is no consensus in the secondary literature as to the nature of this role, and the extent to which Schelling changed his mind on the subject. The paper will defend the claim that Schelling holds consistently, from his early texts to the Philosophy of Art, that philosophy is in some sense prior to art while essenally dependent on it. The paper will explore the development of this posion from various perspecves. This will shed light on Schelling's view on both art and philosophy and his view that in the future the two will merge. Introducon In his early wrings, up unto his so-called "middle period" starng with the Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Schelling treats art as having a crucial role with respect to philosophy. As early as the Philosophical Leers on Cricism and Dogmasm (1795) and the Oldest System Program of German Idealism (1797), which is sll debated as regards its authorship, Schelling claims that art and poetry play a central role in philosophy’s realizaon of its potenal. Broadly, this potenal is that of obtaining the right relaon to the Absolute—the substrate in which the disncon between subject and object collapses, and one has direct access to ideas or archetypes. Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) plays a pivotal role in this context because it explicitly develops a more detailed theory of art than his earlier wrings, staking the somewhat dramac claim that philosophy can actualize its potenal—which, in its own domain remains unrealized—only through the modality of art. That is, art, and more speciﬁcally the arst,