Abstract

Although Fichte’s extensive writings and complex system of transcendental philosophy have received increasing attention in recent years both in Europe and the United States, the direction of this work has been different on the two continents. In a number of respects the two books under review here nicely illustrate these contrasting directions. While the Europeans, particularly Reinhard Lauth and his students, have explored many aspects of Fichte’s work in great detail, most of the recent English language articles on Fichte have focused primarily on his published writings of the Jena period, and particularly on the Grundlage. Hohler shares that approach. He provides a close textual exposition of important passages in the Grundlage with some perspicacious and helpful commentary on several matters such as the presuppositions of free action and the relationship between the ideas of reflection, intellectual intuition, and intersubjectivity. He also touches helpfully on the unpublished Wissenschaftslehre novo methodo. But, again like his Anglo-American colleagues, at critical junctures Hohler appears unaware of relevant European scholarship. So, for example, he claims that “every interpretation of Fichte from that time to the present” has followed Hegel’s reading of Fichte’s system; but at the same time his own bibliography lists two important works by Girndt and Siep which not only do not follow Hegel, but which call his interpretation into question. Although intersubjectivity plays a crucial role in Hohler’s argument, he does not seem to know of the late C. K. Hunter’s groundbreaking work Der Interpersonalitätsbeweis in Fichtes früher angewandter praktischer Philosophie which, although not primarily concerned with the Grundlage, does anticipate his own ideas in important ways. Finally, the text suffers from some clumsy and infelicitous writing, occasionally staying so far inside Fichtean terminology that its explanations are little help in clarifying the difficulties of the original. Hohler does attempt some interesting novelties in translating, and his work will be of interest to English speaking students of Fichte. It should be noted that, despite the cover’s claim that this is “the first secondary work on Fichte’s Grundlage available in English,” it is in fact at best the third and Helen Bliss Talbot’s Fichte’s Philosophy ) even if one discounts the reasonably full discussion in Copleston.