Schiller’s philosophical letters: naturalising spirit to moralise nature

The Philosophical letters is a short piece that Schiller composed in the early eighties and published in the Thalia in 1786. Despite its title, the work has received little attention from philosophers. My aim in this paper is to show that if we read the Letters with the Dissertation in view, we can get an interesting perspective on the moral motivation for Schiller’s interactionism in these early works that touches on certain unresolved problems also in the later works.