The first of these was a review of a skeptical critique of Kantian philosophy in general and Reinhold’s so-called Elementarphilosophie (“Elementary Philosophy”) in particular. The philological tradition is one of painstaking textual analysis, often related to literary history and using a fairly traditional descriptive framework. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Rammenau, 19 de mayo de 1762-Berlín, 29 de enero de 1814) fue un filósofo alemán de gran importancia en la historia del pensamiento occidental.Como continuador de la filosofía crítica de Kant y precursor tanto de Schelling como de la filosofía del espíritu de Hegel, es considerado uno de los padres del llamado idealismo alemán. Since 1995, there is a university association with the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig. One of the tasks of philosophy, according to these lectures, is to offer rational guidance towards the ends that are most appropriate for a free and harmonious society. Fichte decided to travel to Königsberg to meet Kant himself, and on July 4, 1791 the disciple had his first interview with the master. Fichte claims, however, that the alternatives can actually take only one form. Although Fichte himself did not explicitly criticize Christianity by appealing to this test, such a restriction on the content of a possible revelation, if consistently imposed, would overturn some aspects of orthodox Christian belief, including, for example, the doctrine of original sin, which states that everyone is born guilty as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. In order to prove his expertise in the Critical philosophy, Fichte quickly composed a manuscript on the relation of the Critical philosophy to the question of divine revelation, an issue that Kant had yet to address in print. Yet if it is a self-producing process, then it also seems that it must be free, since in some as yet unspecified fashion it owes its existence to nothing but itself. He built microscopes in Jena from 1846 onward. This page was last edited on 29 March 2021, at 05:04. His reluctance to publish gave his contemporaries the false impression that he was more or less finished as an original philosopher. Fichte arrived in Jena in May 1794. Student fraternities – in particular the Burschenschaften – were dissolved and incorporated into the Nazi student federation. The Schiller Gardenhouse [de] (Schillers Gartenhaus) and the Goethe Memorial at the Botanical Garden are reminders of the two towering geniuses of Jena. When the War of Liberation broke out in 1813, Fichte canceled his lectures and joined the militia. Strictly speaking, this is incorrect, since this work, as its title indicates, was meant as the foundations of the system as a whole; the other parts of the system were to be written afterwards. 4087474/2019) He also anonymously published two political works, “Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, Who Have Oppressed It Until Now” and Contribution to the Rectification of the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution. Among the collections which are open to the public are the Phyletic Museum [de] (Phyletisches Museum), an institution which is unique in Europe for illustrating the history of evolution, the Ernst-Haeckel-Memorialmuseum, the Mineralogical Collection which traces its roots back to Goethe and the second oldest Botanical Garden of Middle Europe. Because neither view was orthodox at the time, Fichte was accused of atheism and ultimately forced to leave Jena. The former is transcendental philosophy; the latter, a naturalistic approach to experience that explains it solely in causal terms. Als Hegel 1801 nach Jena kommt, stellt er sich Schelling in dessen Versuch zur Seite, Natur- und Transzendentalphilosophie in einem Identitätssystem zu vereinigen. It is also called comparative philology when the emphasis is on the comparison of the historical states of different languages. Therefore, many English-language commentators and translators prefer to use the German term as the untranslated proper name that designates Fichte’s system as a whole. Whether or not these criticisms were just (and Fichte certainly denied that they were), they further damaged Fichte’s philosophical reputation. (Fichte’s indebtedness to the Kantian notion of autonomy in the form of self-imposed lawfulness should be obvious to anyone familiar with the Critical philosophy.). It became widely known that he was their author; consequently, from the very beginning of his public career, he was identified with radical causes and views. Thus the Wissenschaftslehre seeks to justify the cognitive task of the science of geometry, i.e., its systematic efforts at spatial construction in the form of theorems validly deduced from axioms known with self-evident certainty. The later fame of Ernst Haeckel eclipsed Darwin in some European countries, as the term "Haeckelism" was more common than Darwinism. After Fichte postulates the self-positing I as the explanatory ground of all experience, he then begins to complicate the web of concepts required to make sense of this initial postulate, thereby carrying out the aforementioned construction of the self-positing I. Also in 1933, many professors had to leave the university as a consequence of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Another famous series of lectures, Addresses to the German Nation, given in 1808 during the French occupation, was intended as a continuation of The Characteristics of the Present Age, but exclusively for a German audience. In addition to the faculties the following "Collaborative Research Centers" (German "Sonderforschungsbereich", short: "SFB") operate at the university: Participations in DFG-Collaborative Research Centres: In 2006 the research center, Jena Center – History of the 20th century, was founded. With Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling and Friedrich von Schlegel on its teaching staff, the university was at the centre of the emergence of German idealism and early Romanticism. This time, Kant was justifiably impressed by the results and arranged for his own publisher to bring out the work, which appeared in 1792 under the title An Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation. Reinhold had argued that this first principle was what he called the “principle of consciousness,” namely, the proposition that “in consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is related to both.” From this principle Reinhold attempted to deduce the contents of Kant’s Critical philosophy. Friedrich Schiller University is the only German University with a chair for gravitational theory and one for Caucasus Studies. In 1905, Jena had 1,100 students enrolled and its teaching staff (including Privatdozenten) numbered 112. Once again, Fichte demonstrated his interest in larger matters, and in a manner perfectly consistent with his earlier insistence from the Jena period that the scholar has a cultural role to play. Walter E. Wright. The level of detail that Fichte provides on these matters exceeds that found in Kant’s writings. The Jena Period (1794-1799) a. Fichte’s Philosophical Vocation. Over the course of its history, a sizeable number of University of Jena alumni have become notable in their fields, both academic, and in the wider world. The University of Jena has preserved a historical detention room or Karzer with famous caricatures by Swiss painter Martin Disteli. Such a method leaves open the possibility of other explanations of our experience. The Berlin years, while productive, represent a decline in Fichte’s fortunes, since he never regained the degree of influence among philosophers that he had enjoyed during the Jena years, although he remained a popular author among non-philosophers. More wandering and frustration followed. Profesor en la Universidad de Jena hasta 1794, una acusación de ateísmo lo obligó a trasladarse a Berlín, de cuya universidad fue primero docente y más tarde rector. According to Fichte, there are five stages of history in which the human race progresses from the rule of instinct to the rule of reason. He died on January 29, 1814. 2. 3-5, 86641 Rain, Tel. As Fichte would frequently claim, he remained true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Kant’s thought. Besides filling out projected portions of the system, Fichte also began to revise the foundations themselves. Johann Gottlieb Fichte is one of the major figures in German philosophy in the period between Kant and Hegel. 09090 77-0, Dehner Gartencenter Österreich GmbH & Co. KG, Pluskaufstraße 10, A-4061 Pasching (Art. Unfortunately for Fichte, things did not go well, and Kant was not especially impressed by his visitor. Jena, 1236 als Stadt urkundlich benannt, war eine alte Weinbauernsiedlung und gelangte seit Gründung der Universität 1558 zu europäischem Ruf. Yet it is the essential core of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre in general and the 1794/95 Foundations in particular. The meaning and purpose of this new first principle would not become clear to his readers until the publication of the 1794/95 Foundations. There is thus an argumentative impasse between the two camps. Today, however, Fichte is more correctly seen as an important philosopher in his own right, as a thinker who carried on the tradition of German idealism in a highly original form. Its current president, Walter Rosenthal [de], was elected in 2014 for a six-year term. This understanding of Fichte was encouraged by Hegel himself, and no doubt for self-serving reasons. For reasons that are still mysterious, Fichte’s name and preface were omitted from the first edition of An Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation, and thus the book, which displayed an extensive and subtle appreciation of Kant’s thought, was taken to be the work of Kant himself. Founded as a home for the new religious opinions of the sixteenth century, it has since been one of the most politically radical universities in Germany. Moreover, this world is found to contain other finite rational beings. Trans. Furthermore, the I posits itself as free, since these constraints are ones that it imposes on itself. The usual English translations of this term, such as “science of knowledge,” “doctrine of science,” or “theory of science,” can be misleading, since today these phrases carry connotations that can be excessively theoretical or too reminiscent of the natural sciences. Furthermore, he claimed that God has no existence apart from the moral world order. His wife Johanna, who was serving as a volunteer nurse in a military hospital, contracted a life-threatening fever. Second, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi accused the Wissenschaftslehre of nihilism: that is, of producing reality out of mere mental representations, and thus in effect from nothingness. Furthermore, how does it serve as a basis for deducing the rest of the Wissenschaftslehre? After following Schelling to Jena in 1801, Hegel published his first independent contributions to German idealism, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801), in which he distinguishes Fichte’s “subjective” idealism from Schelling’s … Between the Jena connections and the NS students wide-ranging human and ideological connections were recorded. Initially considered one of Kant’s most talented followers, Fichte developed his own system of transcendental philosophy, the so-called Wissenschaftslehre. In. Die Stadt ist dank ihrer reizvollen Lage seit langem ein beliebtes Reiseziel. Fichte arrived in Jena in May 1794. The present age, he says, is the third age, an epoch of liberation from instinct and external authority, out of which humanity will ultimately progress until it makes itself and the world it inhabits into a fully self-conscious representative of the life of reason. Fichte’s writings during the rest of the Jena period attempt to fill out and refine the entire system. To earn a living, he published new works and gave private lectures. Since October 2014, the pharmacologist Walter Rosenthal is the president of the University; Chancellor is since 2007 the mathematician Klaus Bartholmé.[4]. Several years of earning his living as an itinerant tutor ensued, during which time he met Johanna Rahn, his future wife, while living in Zurich. During the Third Reich, staunch Nazis moved into leading positions at the university. Fichte, to his consternation, found himself in agreement with much of Schulze’s critique. Posthumously published lectures given between 1796 and 1799. A Senate Commission noted the participation of the physician to the "euthanasia" murders of physically or mentally disabled children. Either, he says, we can begin (as he does) with the I as the ground of all possible experience, or we can begin with the thing in itself outside of our experience. “Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, Who Have Oppressed It Until Now” [1793]. Known as The Vocation of Man, it appeared in 1800 and is probably Fichte’s greatest literary production. Yet perhaps the most persuasive testament to Fichte’s greatness as a philosopher is to be found in his relentless willingness to begin again, to start the Wissenschaftslehre anew, and never to rest content with any prior formulation of his thought. Fichte’s method is sometimes said to be phenomenological, restricting itself to what we can discover by means of reflection. The precise nature of this fact/act, with which the Wissenschaftslehre is supposed to begin, is much debated, even today. The Friedrich-Schiller University is the only comprehensive university in Thuringia. The second, The Way Towards the Blessed Life, which is sometimes said to be a mystical work, treats of morality and religion in a popular format. Fichte was born on May 19, 1762 to a family of ribbon makers. In 1905 the university had 1,100 students and 112 university teachers, so this figure has since been almost twenty-fold. Once it became known that Fichte was the author, he instantly became a philosophical figure of importance; no one whose work had been mistaken for Kant’s, however briefly, could be rightfully denied fame and celebrity in the German philosophical world. In 1934 the university was renamed again, receiving its present name of Friedrich Schiller University. Reprint of the 19th century edition of Fichte’s writings. In the 1794/95 Foundations Fichte expresses the content of the Tathandlung in its most general form as “the I posits itself absolutely.” Fichte is suggesting that the self, which he typically refers to as “the I,” is not a static thing with fixed properties, but rather a self-producing process. Thomas E. Wartenberg. Email: cbhome@earthlink.net There are, in fact, those who do not find it at all self-evident, namely, the dogmatists. In 1806 Fichte published two lecture series that were well-received by his contemporaries. Fichte continued working as a tutor while attempting to fashion his philosophical insights into a system of his own. The racial researcher and SS-Hauptscharführer Karl Astel was appointed professor in 1933, bypassing traditional qualifications and process; he later became rector of the University in 1939. II, Section VII, Chapter VI-XI: Student Life at Jena]. This check is then developed into more refined forms of limitation: sensations, intuitions, and concepts, all united in the experience of the things of the natural world, i.e., the spatio-temporal realm ruled by causal laws. The Foundations of Natural Right Based on the Wissenschaftslehre (1796/97) and The System of Ethical Theory Based on the Wissenschaftslehre (1798) concern themselves with political philosophy and moral philosophy, respectively. Trans. In these manuscripts Fichte typically speaks of the absolute and its appearances, i.e., a philosophically suitable stand-in for a more traditional notion of God and the community of finite rational beings whose existence is grounded in the absolute. In 2008 the Center for Molecular Biomedicine (CMB) and the interdisciplinary research center Laboratory of the Enlightenment were developed as research institutions. This dilemma involves, as he puts it, choosing between idealism and dogmatism. Breazeale, Daniel. 2014 the "Center of Advanced Research" (ZAF) was established. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Rammenau, actual Alemania, 1762 - Berlín, 1814) Filósofo alemán. Presumably, however, those who begin with a disavowal of normativity — as the dogmatists do, because they are that kind of person — can never be brought to agree with the idealists. “The Science of Knowledge in its General Outline” [1810]. Yet this hardly seems to be Fichte’s actual method, since he constantly introduces new concepts that cannot be plausibly interpreted as the logical consequences of the previous ones. Trans. Given the difficulty of the notion, unfortunately, Fichte’s Tathandlung has perplexed his readers from its first appearance. [8].mw-parser-output .div-col{margin-top:0.3em;column-width:30em}.mw-parser-output .div-col-small{font-size:90%}.mw-parser-output .div-col-rules{column-rule:1px solid #aaa}.mw-parser-output .div-col dl,.mw-parser-output .div-col ol,.mw-parser-output .div-col ul{margin-top:0}.mw-parser-output .div-col li,.mw-parser-output .div-col dd{page-break-inside:avoid;break-inside:avoid-column}. The dogmatist position, Fichte implies, ignores the normative aspects of our experience, e.g., warranted and unwarranted belief, correct and incorrect action, and thus attempts to account for our experience entirely in terms of our causal interaction with the world around us. In more modern language, and as a first approximation of its meaning, we can understand the Tathandlung as expressing the concept of a rational agent that constantly interprets itself in light of normative standards that it imposes on itself, in both the theoretical and practical realms, in its efforts to determine what it ought to believe and how it ought to act. As of 2014[update], the university has around 19,000 students enrolled and 375 professors. In this fledgling effort Fichte adhered to many of Kant’s claims about morality and religion by thoughtfully extending them to the concept of revelation. London [Vol. Although this leaves his readers perpetually dissatisfied and desirous of a definitive statement of his views, Fichte, true to his publically declared vocation, makes them into better philosophers through his own example of restless striving for the truth. The series of 14 speeches, delivered whilst Berlin was under French occupation after Prussia's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806, is widely regarded as a founding document of German nationalism, celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Di Giovanni, George and H. S. Harris, eds. Through the patronage of a local nobleman, he was able to attend the Pforta school, which prepared students for a university education, and then the universities of Jena and Leipzig. This fact alone would make Fichte’s work worthy of our attention. He claimed that the principle of consciousness was a reflectively known fact of consciousness, and argued that it could lend credence to various Kantian views, including the distinction between the faculties of sensibility and understanding and the existence of things in themselves. Currently e. g. has joined a cooperation in teaching in the field of bioinformatics. Amongst its numerous auxiliaries then were the library, with 200,000 volumes; the observatory; the meteorological institute; the botanical garden; the seminaries of theology, philology, and education; and the well-equipped clinical, anatomical, and physical institutes. After the end of the Saxon duchies in 1918, and their merger with further principalities into the Free State of Thuringia in 1920, the university was renamed as the Thuringian State University (Thüringische Landesuniversität) in 1921. Instead, they both articulate and refine the initial principle of the self-positing I in accordance with the demands made on the idealist who is attempting to clarify the nature of the self-positing I by means of reflection. Through technical philosophical works and popular writings Fichte exercised great influence over his contemporaries, especially during his years at the University of Jena. Prior to the 20th century, University enrollment peaked in the 18th century. In the 20th century the university was promoted through cooperation with Carl Zeiss (company) and also became thereby a mass university. Yet Fichte does not claim that we simply find the fully formed Tathandlung residing somewhere within us; instead, we construct it in order to explain ourselves to ourselves, to render intelligible to ourselves our normative nature as finite rational beings. Such an inference, he claimed, was impossible, since logic abstracted from the content of knowledge and thus could not produce a new object of knowledge. Next, by means of further reflection, the I becomes aware of a difference between “representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity” and “representations accompanied by a feeling a freedom” — that is, a difference between representations of what purports to be an objective world existing apart from our representations of it and representations that are merely the product of our own mental activity. Fichte and G.W.F. Dehner Gartencenter GmbH & Co. KG, Donauwörther Str. His immersion in Kant’s writings, according to his own testimony, revolutionized his thinking and changed his life, turning him away from a deterministic view of the world at odds with human freedom towards the doctrines of the Critical philosophy and its reconciliation of freedom and determinism. In other words, the deductions in the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre are more than merely analytical explications of the consequences of the original premise. In October 1793 he married his fiancée, and shortly thereafter unexpectedly received a call from the University of Jena to take over the chair in philosophy that Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758-1823), a well-known exponent and interpreter of the Kantian philosophy, had recently vacated. Attentive readers should have instantly gleaned Fichte’s radical views from the placid Kantian prose. Curtis Bowman If, however, such a choice between starting points is possible, then the principle of the self-positing I lacks the self-evident certainty that Fichte attributed to it in his earlier essay on the concept of the Wissenschaftslehre. In 2007 the graduate school "Jena School for Microbial Communication" (JSMC) was established within the German Universities Excellence Initiative. Since he considered the mode of presentation of the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre unsatisfactory, he began drawing up a new version in his lectures, which were given three times between 1796 and 1799, but which he never managed to publish. As a result, Fichte is sometimes said to have taken a religious turn in the Berlin period. These lectures, which in some respects are superior to the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, were published posthumously and are now known as the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. The task of the former work is to characterize the legitimate constraints that can be placed on individual freedom in order to produce a community of maximally free individuals who simultaneously respect the freedom of others. In the latter 19th century, the department of zoology taught evolutionary theory, with Carl Gegenbaur, Ernst Haeckel and others publishing detailed theories at the time of Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1858). The Wissenschaftslehre, which itself is a science in need of a first principle, is said to be grounded on the Tathandlung first mentioned in the Aenesidemus review. In an essay from 1798 entitled “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World” Fichte argued that religious belief could be legitimate only insofar as it arose from properly moral considerations — a view clearly indebted to his book on revelation from 1792. Two open letters, both from 1799 and written by philosophers whom Fichte fervently admired, compounded his troubles. Here Fichte envisions a new form of national education that would enable the German nation, not yet in existence, to reach the fifth and final age outlined in the earlier lecture series. It was renamed after the poet Friedrich Schiller who was teaching as professor of philosophy when Jena attracted some of the most influential minds at the turn of the 19th century. “Fichte’s Original Insight.” Trans. And last but not least, there are common sports activities. Innentreppen bequem von zu Hause online bestellen Treppen & Geländer finden Sie online und in Ihrem OBI Markt vor Ort OBI - alles für Heim, Haus, Garten und Bau! Except for a cryptic outline that appeared in 1810, his Berlin lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, of which there are numerous versions, only appeared posthumously. When the Allied air raids to Jena in February and March struck in 1945, the University Library, the University main building and several clinics in the Bachstraße received total or significant physical damage. In the summer of 1790, while living in Leipzig and once again in financial distress, Fichte agreed to tutor a university student in the Kantian philosophy, about which he knew very little at the time. The I posits itself insofar as it is aware of itself, not only as an object but also as a subject, and finds itself subject to normative constraints in both the theoretical and practical realms, e.g., that it must be free of contradiction and that there must be adequate reasons for what it believes and does. The work under review, an anonymously published polemic called Aenesidemus, which was later discovered to have been written by Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833), and which appeared in 1792, greatly influenced Fichte, causing him to revise many of his views, but did not lead him to abandon Reinhold’s concept of philosophy as rigorous science, an interpretation of the nature of philosophy that demanded that philosophical principles be systematically derived from a single foundational principle known with certainty. This interpretation is surely mistaken, even though one can find passages that seem to support it. This admittedly obscure starting point is subject to much scrutiny and qualification as the Wissenschaftslehre proceeds. Prior to publishing any systematic presentation of his philosophy of religion, Fichte became embroiled in what is now known as the Atheismusstreit, the atheism controversy. Fichte called his philosophical system the Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte’s remarks about systematic form and certainty in “Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre” give the impression that he intends to demonstrate the entirety of the Wissenschaftslehre from the principle of the self-positing I through a chain of logical inferences that merely set out the implications of the initial principle in such a way that the certainty of the first principle is transferred to the claims inferred from it. Carl Zeiss was born in Weimar on 11 September 1816. The Nazi student federation enjoyed before the transfer of power and won great support among the student body elections in January 1933, achieving 49.3% of the vote, which represents the second best result. Before moving to Jena, and while he was living in the house of his father-in-law in Zurich, Fichte wrote two short works that presaged much of the Wissenschaftslehre that he devoted the rest of his life to developing. More important, though, is the question of the epistemic status of the principle. In, “On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy” [1794]. Much of Fichte’s work in the remainder of the Jena period attempted to complete the system as it was envisioned in the 1794/95 Foundations. Trans. Both buildings are also open to the public. She recovered, but Fichte fell ill with the same ailment. Together with Ernst Abbe, he succeeded in placing the construction of microscopes on … Suo padre, Johann Adolf Schlegel, era un pastore luterano e un compositore di inni sacri. This element of Christian theology, which is said to be grounded in the revelations contained in the Bible, is hardly compatible with the view of justice underwritten by the moral law. During the 20th century, the cooperation between Zeiss corporation and the university brought new prosperity and attention to Jena, resulting in a dramatic increase in funding and enrollment. In. Although Fichte’s importance for the history of German philosophy is undisputed, the nature of his legacy is still very much debated. The principle of the self-positing I was initially interpreted along the lines of Berkeley’s idealism, and thus as claiming that the world as a whole is somehow the product of an infinite mind. He continued his philosophical work until the very end of his life, lecturing on the Wissenschaftslehre and writing on political philosophy and other subjects. Early in life he impressed everyone with his great intelligence, but his parents were too poor to pay for his schooling. The university's reputation peaked under the auspices of Duke Charles Augustus, Goethe's patron (1787–1806), when Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich von Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller were on its teaching staff. In 1800 Fichte settled in Berlin and continued to philosophize.