Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo) 1796-99

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Daniel Breazeale (Translator)

"This work is a model of what a philosophical text should be." Reinhard Lauth "Breazeale's translation is fluent, precise, and perhaps most important of all . . . it is readable. . . . This is an excellent translation by the ranking Fichte scholar working in English at present, accompanied by a full, useful scholarly apparatus, likely to be of interest to Fichte scholars and all those concerned with the development of German idealism." Review of Metaphysics "The publishing of this volume in English . . . provides us with a wealth of new material, not just about Fichte's development, but about the essentially Cartesian project that first gave rise to phenomenology in our own century." International Philosophical Quarterly

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Germany

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1799

About the author

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Like Descartes and Kant before him, the problem of subjectivity and consciousness motivated much of his philosophical rumination. Fichte also wrote political philosophy, and is thought of by some as the father of German nationalism.
His son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, was also a renowned philosopher.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most important texts for finding the most explicit and fully developed accounts of intellectual intuition given by Fichte. He argues that we have an intellectual intuition of the ‘I’ as ‘subject-object’. It also contains an explicit critique of Kant for rejecting the notion of intellectual intuition when it is, according to Fichte, already present in Kant’s system:

‘Kant recognizes that self-consciousness occurs, i.e., a consciousness of the act of intuiting within time. How could he have arrived at such a recognition? Only by means of an intuition—and such an intuition is certainly intellectual […] Kant, in his system, merely failed to reflect upon this type of intellectual intuition. His system, however, does contain the result of this intellectual intuition: [in the recognition] that our representations are products of our self-active mind’ (WLNM 115).