Lectures on the Theory of Ethics (1812)

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Benjamin D. Crowe (Introduction)

Translated here for the first time into English, this text furnishes a new window into the final phase of Fichte's career. Delivered in the summer of 1812 at the newly founded University of Berlin, Fichte's lectures on ethics explore some of the key concepts and issues in his evolving system of radical idealism. Addressing moral theory, the theory of education, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of religion, Fichte engages both directly and indirectly with some of his most important contemporaries and philosophical rivals, including Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Benjamin D. Crowe's translation includes extensive annotations and a German-English glossary. His introduction situates the text systematically, historically, and institutionally within an era of cultural ferment and intellectual experimentation, and includes a bibliography of recent scholarship on Fichte's moral theory and on the final period of his career.

Genres: Philosophy

216 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2015

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.