PHIL 367 Midterm: Fichte
Document Summary
The wissenschaftslehre, (doctrine of science), is meant to reconcile freedom with necessity (to merge the theoretical and practical worlds of knowledge in kant. ) Beings with subjective spontaneity and freedom ; yet, from this there is an objective necessity and limitation in order to achieve the former. Claims in the first intro that he is explaining the basis of the system of representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity. Thing in itself a mind-independent, external cause of sensations, is indefensible on critical grounds. Believed the first task to be to discover a single, self-evident principle upon which a system can be built or derived. This principle therefore cannot be established by any sort of reasoning. Fichte believed that there are only two starting points for this endeavour: the concept of pure selfhood (freedom) and that of pure thinghood (necessity), which can only be arrived at at philosophical abstraction from experience. The first results in idealism, the latter results on dogmatism.