Fichte’s early review of C. A. L. Creuzer’s neglected and idiosyncratic skeptical book on free will posed a serious challenge to what at the time was emerging as a consensus Kantian position on the role of free choice in the generation of imputable action. Fichte’s review was directed as much against Reinhold’s important letter on freedom of the will as it was against Creuzer himself. In the course of his brief review, Fichte suggests an important recasting of the strategy of (...) the Kantian postulates of rational faith; he poses a dilemma for the Reinholdian understanding of the relationship among an autonomous practical will, a free power of choice, and the actions of natural human organisms; and he hints at a radical reappropriation of the rationalist doctrine of pre-established harmony in re-orienting the search for a defensible reconstruction of a broadly Kantian position on the problem of free will. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Fichte's attempt to reconcile the dualism of concept and intuition requires the overcoming of any idea of a thing-in-itself. At the same time he preserves the idea of an external constraint on the I's self-positing. This central role for the realist constraint of the check conflicts with recent interpretations of Fichte that see his project as advocating the exclusivity of the space of reasons. The striving subject confronts and unifies the opposition between the realistic (...) and idealistic elements in the Wissenschaftslehre. It is argued that as striving, reason's drive for self-determination is a process of self-transformation, as consciousness confronts the limitations of its inadequate explanations of the objects of experience. (shrink)

Consciousness, which is one of the central issues of German idealism, has received various interpretations among German philosophers. Assuming the thing-in-itself, Kant presented consciousness in pieces and presented it in the form of three critiques. After him, Reinholt and Schultze, by criticizing the thing-in-itself, provided the ground for a new interpretation of consciousness by Fichte. Fichte with approval Schultze's critique of the thing-in-itself, rightly gathered consciousness into the unity of the absolute subject. He then gave a revolutionary interpretation of how (...) consciousness develops by creating a dialectical relationship between consciousness, self-consciousness, and intersubjectivity. In this article, we try to explain Fichte's interpretation of consciousness according to the relationship that he establishes between consciousness, self-consciousness and intersubjectivity, and to present the calendar of consciousness and self-consciousness in the political situation. He first argues that consciousness logically requires an order in which self-consciousness provides its development and He then considers the order in consciousness as dependent on the creation of a relationship that occurs in the process of recognition between subjects. (shrink)

This thesis argues that Kant is able to maintain the distinctiveness of his position in opposition to Hume's naturalism (contrary to the arguments of R. A. Mall and L. W. Beck) without invoking premises which are question begging with regard to Hume's scepticism. The argument of Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, as presented in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is considered in relation to the two sets of criticism that have been levelled at it from (...) its publication up to the present day, both of which aim to demonstrate that synthetic a priori judgements are subjectively necessary but without objective validity. The first set of criticisms involves problems raised with regard to the status of transcendental arguments. The difficulties identified here (by B. Stroud, M. S. Gram, and others) are that the Deduction can either, at best, show that it is necessary for experience to be regarded in a certain way without demonstrating anything as to the nature of experience as such, or the argument is circular in that it begins by making assumptions regarding the nature of our experience. Alternatively, if the Deduction is taken to establish the objective nature of concepts via an analysis of the conditions under which it is possible for us to have some knowledge of ourselves, then incoherence is said to arise because this requires either an implausible reflective theory of consciousness (according to D. Henrich) or that we have knowledge of the subject-in-itself (as held by J. G. Fichte and other contemporaries of Kant). Through a consideration of both the historical and contemporary manifestations of these criticisms, the thesis advances an interpretation of the Deduction, with special attention paid to the role and nature of the subject, which does not fall prey to the alleged incoherence. As such, the thesis defends both the distinctiveness and legitimacy of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

In 1797, subsequent to Jacobi’s (1787) and Schulze’s (1792) objections against Kantian criticism, Fichte intends to “save” critical philosophy by evacuating the thing in itself of theoretical discourse. By doing this, Fichte sets out to develop a coherent – and definitive – version of critical philosophy, which amounts to a radicalised account of transcendental idealism. Yet, two years later (1799), Kant publicly dismisses Fichte’s project, refusing to characterise it as “critical.” What Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is missing, is precisely a foundation grounded (...) on a “real object”. As we shall see, it is the status of the thing in itself which is highly problematic. This paper intends to show that Kantian criticism can coherently claim, thanks to a specific use of philosophical analogy, that the thing in itself transcendentally grounds phenomena. (shrink)