In this study of Fichte's social and political philosophy, David James offers an interpretation of Fichte's most famous writings in this area, including his Foundations of Natural Right and Addresses ...to the German Nation, centred on two main themes: property and virtue. These themes provide the basis for a discussion of such issues as what it means to guarantee the freedom of all the citizens of a state, the problem of unequal relations of economic dependence between states, and the differences and connections between the legal and political sphere of right and morality. James also relates Fichte's central social and political ideas to those of other important figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Kant and Hegel, as well as to the radical phase of the French Revolution. His account will be of importance to all who are interested in Fichte's philosophy and its intellectual and political context.
The claim that Rousseau's writings influenced the development of Kant's critical philosophy, and German idealism, is not a new one. As correct as the claim may be, it does not amount to a systematic ...account of Rousseau's place within this philosophical tradition. It also suggests a progression whereby Rousseau's achievements are eventually eclipsed by those of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, especially with respect to the idea of freedom. In this book David James shows that Rousseau presents certain challenges that Kant and the idealists Fichte and Hegel could not fully meet, by making dependence and necessity, as well as freedom, his central concerns, and thereby raises the question of whether freedom in all its forms is genuinely possible in a condition of human interdependence marked by material inequality. His study will be valuable for all those studying Kant, German idealism and the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas.
Abstract
In what follows, I attempt to reconstruct Fichte’s and Hegel’s reasons for developing at almost the same time two very different conceptions of a rational economic order. Whereas Hegel, on ...the basis of his objective notion of reason, would recommend that a rational state, founded on the notion of right, should include a strictly confined, socially embedded market economy, Fichte, on the basis of his subjective notion of reason, thought instead that the very same state must adopt an economic order that might well be described as a ‘planned economy’. Throughout the article I discuss whether it is the stark differences in their methodological premisses or their very different ideas about the individual freedom to be institutionalized in the economic sphere that helps us understand their respective notions of a rational economy.
Freedom as right Rödl, Sebastian
European journal of philosophy,
September 2021, 2021-09-00, 20210901, Letnik:
29, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
I want to expound the fundamental thought of Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts: a freely acting individual is her relation to every other freely acting individual. Their relation is this: they know ...each other to be free. This knowledge is practical, that is, it is activity, and it is a relation, that is, they who are so related act one toward the other. This knowledge, this activity, this relation, which the free individual is, is the relation of right.
The following paper questions the idea behind Stephen Darwall's attempt to ground all moral obligations in a perspective that he calls “second‐personal.” In a first step, I will reconstruct Darwall's ...argument with the aim of raising doubt over whether the moral norms that supposedly govern interpersonal interactions in fact result from their reference to a “you,” as he claims, rather than from a reference to a collectively implied “we”, as I shall go on to argue (1). Posing this question will then afford me an opportunity to look more closely at Hegel's implicit reservations about Fichte's doctrine of recognition, reservations which I find entirely persuasive (2). In a final step, I will return to Darwall's project. In my view, this project ultimately fails due to its denial of the social, and thus conflictual, character of the moral norms governing participants within the I–you relation (3).
This volume of articles in English by an international team of scholars presents new critical perspectives on the first principles of J.G. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and some of the key ...sub-disciplines of his philosophy.
While the relation between embodiment and intersubjectivity is often remarked upon in the literature on Fichte, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that for Fichte the two are strongly ...interdependent. In this paper, by elaborating on his account of the fine structure of the embodied agency, I argue that for Fichte one's relation to one's own body is socially constituted. Further, I show that the usual stricture in the literature, according to which Fichte does not allow for bodily passivity, is misleading. Indeed, as I argue, Fichte's account of embodied agency is sufficiently nuanced as to be able to explain “passive bodily expressions,” that is, those bodily expressions that are not under direct control of the agent. And related to that, contrary to the commonly held view, Fichte does offer a satisfactory account of the more sentient bodily phenomena, such as pain, hunger, and fatigue, which happen to the agent without her being capable of controlling their happening. Indeed, as I will show, for Fichte, these latter phenomena, rather than being simply restrictive of agency, may positively contribute to the exercise of agency.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of religion combines revolutionary pathos with Christian convictions and transcendental philosophical insights. The result is a bourgeois philosophy of religion ...that preaches freedom, equality and brotherhood, expects the national upswing of a still-longed-for Germany based on the example of revolutionary France, and praises all this as a continuation of Kant’s philosophy.
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