In his Grundriß des Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre (1795, p. 387 f.) Fichte thematizes a problem for any would-be transcendental philosophy first raised by Salomon Maimon: How can any philosophy claim to uphold the claim to objectivity (i.e. the validity of the categories of the understanding with respect to objects of experience) while, at the same time, maintaining that the imagination is a necessary ingredient in the application of these categories to these objects? Fichte provides an answer to this question that is, at first glance, making matters worse in its wholehearted embrace of the (productive) imagination as the ground for the both the categories and the objects of experience they are applied to. While it is true, one might grant Fichte, that the question of applicability of the categories to the objects of experience may be trivially solved by this move, it seems hazardous to the alleged proof of the objectivity of our representations these objects - and thus to the claims of a transcendental philosophy that, in the words of Wilfrid Sellars, must aim to delineate „the gen-eral features any conceptual system must have in order to generate knowledge of a world to which it belongs“ (Sellars, Some Remarks on Kant’s Theory of Experience, JP 1967:646). Is not Fichte’s answer tantamount to give up on this central task of transcendental philosophy? In my paper I would like to show that - his conception of imagination notwithstanding - not only did Fichte have an extremely interesting and challenging answer to the problem of the objectivity of our representations of objects of experience, but furthermore was right about his claim that his own answer was not at all alien to the ‚spirit‘ of Kant’s critical philosophy. I will show this in particular by giving a close reading of the intricate, yet important „Deduction of Representation (Deduction der Vorstellung)“of the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (1794).

The article discusses the connection between art and emotion in Fichte’s work and its contemporary reception by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. For the latter, not only selected architectural theoretical studies but also Schinkel’s ideal architectural designs are consulted. Schinkel knew Fichte personally and held him in high esteem. This is evidenced by some of Schinkel’s verbatim references to various forms of the Wissenschaftslehre and its sub-disciplines, as well as his extremely precise transcripts of lectures around the Berlin versions of the Wissenschaftslehre (around 1800). Schinkel was not only interested in the political and religious implications of Fichte’s theory of a cultural history of humankind, but his engagement with Fichte is also characterized above all by the theory of consciousness. This aspect plays a central role in the article. In recourse to the aesthetic emotion of the mind, a main concern of Fichte’s philosophy is to be placed in the horizon of architecture, which manifests itself in these questions: how does one convey a realisation in such a way that the recipient reconstructs it almost independently and it becomes a practical value for him as a criterion for his orientation in life? And furthermore – related to the research discourse on Fichte, which has only recently taken note of his aesthetic position and in particular his comments on architecture – how can this model of cognition be applied in his work from an architect’s point of view? In the investigation part on Fichte for this, first the feeling is reconstructed within the framework of the scientific-systematic philosophy as the reason of consciousness, in order to show with it the instance of the question relevant for Schinkel about the pedagogical effectiveness of a life-practical cultivating architecture. In the examination section on Schinkel, it is shown how Schinkel, in the horizon of Fichte, undertakes a determination of the relationship between feeling and ratio, with which he, for his part, establishes architecture as an instrument of cultivation.

This paper addresses Fichte’s puzzle of self-consciousness. I propose a new reading of “Fichte’s original insight”, inspired by Pareyson’s general reading, which I call here the “Fichtean metaphysical turn in transcendental philosophy”. Against the mainstream view in Fichte’s scholarship, I argue that Fichte’s and Kant’s views do not concur regard- ing the primary reference of the “I”, namely spontaneous agency in thinking, which Fichte calls “Tathandlung”. Yet, their views do in fact concur when Fichte claims that this spontaneous agency in thinking is the “essence” or the underlying nature of the self, which Kant denies. Regarding this I take the side of Fichte. But how is Fichte’s original insight supposed to solve the puzzle of self-consciousness? At that transcen- dental level, the puzzle does not arise because there is no need for self-identification in the first place. Transcendental self-knowledge results from the sui generis intellec- tual Selbstanschauung that everyone has of oneself as sheer spontaneous agency in thinking. But at the empirical level, the puzzle does not arise either and for the same reason. Reference to the embodied self dispenses with any self-identification because it is based on the fundamental metaphysical relation everybody has to their own body, namely identity.

Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte 15 (2017) 1-12. https://journals.openedition.org/ref/781 Full text available of: "The 'Double Sense' of Fichte's Philosophical Language. – Some Critical Reflections on the Cambridge Companion to Fichte". Abstract: The principal thesis in this review-essay is that the key linguistic terms in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre especially have two main meanings that appear at first sight to be almost in contradiction or opposed to each other. The reader of Fichte therefore has to work hard to overcome any apparent conflicts in this “double sense” of his philosophical terminology. Accordingly, I argue that Fichte’s linguistic method and use of language should be seen as part of his chief philosophical method of synthesis, where we have to carry out a similar procedure and attempt to reconcile opposites using the power of the imagination. This thesis is put forward by means of a number of practical examples and in the context of some critical reflections on the recently published Cambridge Companion to Fichte, eds. David James and Günter Zöller. Review essay published in Volume 15 (December, 2017) of the online open-access journal Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte (ed. Emiliano Acosta).

This article has as its subject of analysis the images as they are perceived by the observer. As a heuristic symphony this work is a paradigmatic crossover of the phenomenology, the genetic epistemology and the hermeneutics, amalgamated by semiotics. In the first paragraph, a phenomenological reflection of the images is carried out, reaching a division between internal images and external images and between objective images and sign images. In the second paragraph, a genetic analysis of a thought in images is carried out, reaching a division of the sign images in signal images, index images, icon images, symbol images and sign images with its correspondingly levels of abstraction and societal. Finally, in the third paragraph, hermeneutics of the object images as a cultural unit or culturema is carried out. It ends by framing the present study in visual studies and highlighting their relevance in the context of visual culture.

https://brill.com/view/title/59923 Presenting new critical perspectives on J.G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, this volume of articles in English by an international group of scholars addresses the topic of first principles in Fichte’s writings. Especially discussed are the central text of his Jena period, the 1794/95 Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, as well as later versions like the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (1796-99) and the presentations of 1804 and 1805. Also included are new studies on the first principles of the particular sub-disciplines of Fichte’s system, such as the doctrines of aesthetics, nature, right, ethics, and history. The volume also contains a number of miscellaneous essays on Fichte research, as well as several book reviews. Table of Contents: Vorwort / Preface. "Fichte’s First Principles and the Total System of the Wissenschaftslehre" (David W. Wood) Beiträgerverzeichnis / Notes on Contributors Teil 1 / Part 1 Fichte’s Earliest Reflections on First Principles 1 Fichte’s First First Principles, in the Aphorisms on Religion and Deism (1790) and Prior (Jason M. Yonover) 2 General Logic and the Foundational Demonstration of the First Principle in Fichte’s Eigene Meditationen and Early Wissenschaftslehre (David Sommer) 3 The First Principle of Philosophy in Fichte’s 1794 Aenesidemus Review (Elise Frketich) Teil 2 / Part 2 The First Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre 4 Why Is the First Principle of the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre Foundational for Fichte’s Entire Wissenschaftslehre? (Alexander Schnell) 5 Difference within Identity? Fichte’s Reevaluation of the First Principle of Philosophy in § 5 of the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Philipp Schwab) 6 “The Subsequent Delivery of the Deduction” – Fichte’s Transformation of Kant’s Deduction of the Categories (Gesa Wellmann) 7 From Being Reflexive to Absolute Reflection – Fichte’s Original Insight Reconsidered (Stefan Schick) 8 The First Principle of the Wissenschaftslehre and the Logical Principle of Identity (Esma Kayar) 9 Facticity and Genesis: Tracking Fichte’s Method in the Berlin Wissenschaftslehre (G. Anthony Bruno) 10 “Knowledge is Existence” – Ascent to the First Principle in Fichte’s 1805 Erlangen Wissenschaftslehre (Robert G. Seymour) Teil 3 / Part 3 The First Principles of the Sub-Disciplines of the Wissenschaftslehre 11 The Monogram of the “Sweet Songstress of the Night”: The Hovering of the Imagination as the First Principle of Fichte’s Aesthetics (Laure Cahen-Maurel) 12 Fichte’s First Principle of Right (Michael Nance) 13 I-Hood as the Speculative Ground of Fichte’s Real Ethics (Kienhow Goh) 14 The Role of First Principles in Fichte’s Philosophy of History (Pavel Reichl) 15 Circumvolutions of the Mind: Fichte on First Principles and Transcendental Circuits (Carlos Zorrilla Piña) Teil 4 / Part 4 Freie Beiträge 16 ‘Transcendental’ in Kant and Fichte: A Conceptual Shift and Its Philosophical Meaning (Elena Ficara) 17 Fichtes Kolleg „Moral für Gelehrte“ – Jena 1794–1795: Zur Geschichte von „Über Geist und Buchstaben“ (Ricardo Barbosa) 18 Die gelehrte Bildung nach der göttlichen Idee in Über das Wesen des Gelehrten (Quentin Landenne) 19 Fichte’s Original Insight Reviewed (Roberto Horácio Sá Pereira) 20 Images de l’ absolu : Phénoménologie matérielle et phénoménologie fichtéenne (Frédéric Seyler) Teil 5 / Part 5 Rezensionen 1 Luis Fellipe Garcia, La philosophie comme Wissenschaftslehre. Le projet fichtéen d’ une nouvelle pratique du savoir. Olms: Hildesheim 2018 (Reviewed by Antonella Carbone) 2 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die späten wissenschaftlichen Vorlesungen IV, 1: Transzendentale Logik 1 (1812). Neu herausgegeben von Hans Georg von Manz und Ives Radrizzani. Unter Mitarbeit von Erich Fuchs. Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2019 (Reviewed by Zhu Lei) 3 Thomas Sören Hoffmann (Hrsg.), Fichtes Geschlossener Handelsstaat. Beiträge zur Erschließung eines Anti-Klassikers. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2018 (Reviewed by Konstantinos Masmanidis) Index https://brill.com/view/title/59923

The following paper argues that J.G. Fichte, despite his apparent philosophical neglect of art and aesthetics, does develop a strong, original, and coherent account of art, which not only allows the theorization of modern, non-representative art forms, but indeed anticipates Nietzsche and Heidegger in conceiving of truth in terms of art rather than scientific rationality. While the basis of Fichte’s philosophy of art is presented in the essay “On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy,” it is not developed systematically either in this text or anywhere else in his writings, but must be reconstructed through a broad consideration of all his works, including, above all, his political and economic writings. For Fichte, the art-work does not exist as an object possessing “aesthetic value” and which can, in turn, be possessed, consumed, and enjoyed through the subjective act of aesthetic experience. Rather, it involves a mode of praxis which, grounded in a radical and original power of imagination, creatively discloses possibilities for future forms of existence, experience, and political community that cannot be theoretically anticipated. While Fichte cannot himself theorize specific forms of art, since the art that concerns him belongs to the future, we can, however, retrospectively try to understand non-representational painting and non-mimetic dance as concrete realizations of Fichte’s art-work of the future. In this way, Fichte’s philosophy of art ultimately suggests an alternative to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a projective institution of truth. Fichte suggests that the human body, rather than human language, is the fundamental medium of art.

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image (eikōn) as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function, namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, C zanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

If I close my eyes, the absence of light activates the peripheral cells devoted to the perception of darkness. The awareness of “seeing oneself seeing” is in its essence a thought, one that is internal to the vision and previous to any object of sight. To this amphibious faculty, the “diaphanous color of darkness,” Aristotle assigns the principle of knowledge. “Vision is a whole perceptual system, not a channel of sense.” Functions of vision are interwoven with the texture of human interaction within a terrestrial environment that is in turn contained into the cosmic order. A transitive host within the resonance of an inner-outer environment, the human being is the contact-term between two orders of scale, both bigger and smaller than the individual unity. In the perceptual integrative system of human vision, the convergence-divergence of the corporeal presence and the diffraction of its own appearance is the margin. The sensation of being no longer coincides with the breath of life, it does not seems “real” without the trace of some visible evidence and its simultaneous “sharing”. Without a shadow, without an imprint, the numeric copia of the physical presence inhabits the transient memory of our electronic prostheses. A rudimentary “visuality” replaces tangible experience dissipating its meaning and the awareness of being alive. Transversal to the civilizations of the ancient world, through different orders of function and status, the anthropomorphic “figuration” of archaic sculpture addressees the margin between Being and Non-Being. Statuary human archetypes are not meant to be visible, but to exist as vehicles of transcendence to outlive the definition of human space-time. The awareness of individual finiteness seals the compulsion to “give body” to an invisible apparition shaping the figuration of an ontogenetic expression of human consciousness. Subject and object, the term “humanum” fathoms the relationship between matter and its living dimension, “this de facto vision and the ‘there is’ which it contains.” The project reconsiders the dialectic between the terms vision–presence in the contemporary perception of archaic human statuary according to the transcendent meaning of its immaterial legacy.