Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowing, consists of a series of lectures he delivered in his Berlin home to members of the city's political and cultural elite in 1804. The lectures mark a dramatic shift in the terminology and methodology he uses to explore the nature of knowledge and reality as presented in his philosophical system, the Wissenschaftslehre. Although not published during his lifetime, Fichte's 1804 lectures provide a systematic update to his philosophy of knowledge and being, which was only hinted at in print in popular presentations like Characteristics of the Present Age (1805) and The Way Towards the Blessed Life (1806). In fact, these lectures contain Fichte's first public articulation of his philosophical position in the wake of the professional disaster of the "atheism controversy." This volume of new essays not only offers readers novel interpretations of the lectures but also introduces and clarifies key concepts, debates the relationship of the lectures to Fichte’s Jena presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre, and examines issues related to his method and system of idealism.

Daniel Breazeale presents a critical study of the early philosophy of J.G. Fichte, and the version of the Wissenschaftslehre or 'doctrine of science' that Fichte developed in Jena between 1794 and 1799. The book is intended to assist serious readers in their efforts to understand Fichte's philosophy within the context of its own era and to orient them in the ongoing scholarly debates concerning the character and significance of the Wissenschaftslehre. Breazeale focuses on explaining what Fichte was (and was not) trying to accomplish and precisely how he proposed to accomplish this, as well as upon the difficulties implicit in his project and his often novel strategies for overcoming them. To this end, the volume addresses a variety of specific themes, issues, and problems that will be familiar to any student of Fichte's early writings and which continue to be fiercely debated by his interpreters. These include: the relationship of the finite human self to the purely self-positing I, transcendental philosophy as a 'pragmatic history of the mind', Fichte's 'synthetic' method of philosophizing, the standpoint of life vs. the standpoint of speculation, the extra-philosophical presuppositions and implications of the Wissenschaftslehre, the different senses of 'intellectual intuition' in Fichte's early writings, the controversial doctrine of the 'check' (Anstoß) upon the free actions of the I, the various theoretical and practical tasks of philosophy, the refutation of dogmatism and the 'choice' of a philosophical standpoint, the relationship of transcendental idealism to skepticism, the interests of reason, and the problematic 'primacy of the practical' in Fichte's thought.

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism features essays from leading scholars on German philosophy. It is the most comprehensive secondary source available, covering not only the full range of work by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but also idealists such as Reinhold and Schopenhauer, critics such as Jacobi, Maimon, and the German Romantics

Essays on one of J. G. Fichte’s best-known and most controversial works. One of J. G. Fichte’s best-known works, Addresses to the German Nation is based on a series of speeches he gave in Berlin when the city was under French occupation. They feature Fichte’s diagnosis of his own era in European history as well as his call for a new sense of German national identity, based upon a common language and culture rather than “blood and soil.” These speeches, often interpreted as key documents in the rise of modern nationalism, also contain Fichte’s most sustained reflections on pedagogical issues, including his ideas for a new egalitarian system of Prussian national education. The contributors’ reconsideration of the speeches deal not only with technical philosophical issues such as the relationship between language and identity, and the tensions between universal and particular motifs in the text, but also with issues of broader concern, including education, nationalism, and the connection between morality and politics.

Die neuere Forschung zur modernen Philosophiegeschichte hat ihren Blick immer mehr auf die Wurzeln der klassischen deutschen Philosophie in der antiken und spätantiken Gedankenwelt gerichtet. Dieser Sammelband untersucht die Genese und Entwicklung des Deutschen Idealismus anhand der Rezeption und Transformation der Platonischen Tradition bei J. G. Fichte, F. Hölderlin, G.E. F. Hegel und F.W. J. Schelling. Gezeigt wird, inwiefern diese Denker die Leitmotive und die primären Bestimmungen ihres Problemhorizonts im Platonismus entdecken, ihn aber in ihrer eigenen philosophischen Situation grundlegend ändern.

Critique, skepticism, conflict, incompleteness, nothingness, irrational abyss, evil, and even genocide... That is what German idealism is also about. Trying to chart human reason as an architectural system, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling uncovered that the most significant problems lie beneath the ground, in the foundations. Can reason survive the discovery of what lies at its depths? And should it? This book ventures into these foundations, addressing the keen philosophical innovations of German idealists. Through comparative and development studies, it presents fresh interpretations of how these leading thinkers reconstructed reason on unexplored territories. The greatest hazard was triggering an enduring inversion of values.

Phenomenology, together with Marxism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy, dominated philosophy in the 20th century and Edmund Husserl is usually thought to have been the first to develop the concept. The author argues for a return to phenomenology's origins in epistemology and does so by locating its roots in the work of Immanuel Kant.

From the early 1790s until after the turn of the century, a very productive but also controversial exchange took place between Reinhold and Fichte. Though many key aspects of post-Kantian philosophy were discussed, the philosophical confrontation between Reinhold and Fichte is most instructive for the understanding of post-Kantian philosophy. The exchange started when Fichte published his verdict on Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie and disapproved of its fundamental principle. In 1794 Fichte challenged Reinhold by presenting his Wissenschaftslehre. Reinhold was not convinced of Fichte's foundation of philosophy at first, but announced that he accepted the Wissenschaftslehre in 1797. While Reinhold and Fichte officially collaborated in the following three years, tensions concerning fundamental questions were still present. When Reinhold adopted Rational Realism, his relation to Fichte deteriorated and the exchange between the two finally ended. The contributions in the present collection focus on the central systematic issues at the different stages of the confrontation between Fichte and Reinhold, thereby illuminating questions that are essential to the understanding of the evolution of post-Kantian German philosophy.

With renewed attention to German idealism in general and to Fichte in particular, this timely collection of new papers will be of interest to anyone concerned with transcendental philosophy, German idealism, modern German philosophy and transcendental arguments.

The Age of Enlightenment has often been portrayed as a dogmatic period on account of the veritable worship of reason and progress that characterized Eighteenth Century thinkers. Even today the philosophes are considered to have been completely dominated in their thinking by an optimism that leads to dogmatism and ultimately rationalism. However, on closer inspection, such a conception seems untenable, not only after careful study of the impact of scepticism on numerous intellectual domains in the period, but also as a result of a better understanding of the character of the Enlightenment. As Giorgio Tonelli has rightly observed: “the Enlightenment was indeed the Age of Reason but one of the main tasks assigned to reason in that age was to set its own boundaries.” Thus, given the growing number of works devoted to the scepticism of Enlightenment thinkers, historians of philosophy have become increasingly aware of the role played by scepticism in the Eighteenth Century, even in those places once thought to be most given to dogmatism, especially Germany. Nevertheless, the deficiencies of current studies of Enlightenment scepticism are undeniable. In taking up this question in particular, the present volume, which is entirely devoted to the scepticism of the Enlightenment in both its historical and geographical dimensions, seeks to provide readers with a revaluation of the alleged decline of scepticism. At the same time it attempts to resituate the Pyrrhonian heritage within its larger context and to recapture the fundamental issues at stake. The aim is to construct an alternative conception of Enlightenment philosophy, by means of philosophical modernity itself, whose initial stages can be found herein. ​