Rolf-Peter Horstmann

It is widely recognized that Fichte was convinced that it was one of the principal tasks of philosophy to defend the possibility of knowledge against skeptical objections, and that he shared the view of most of his contemporaries (Jacobi, Maimon, Schulze, Reinhold, Schelling, and, somewhat later, Hegel) that the resources and strategies explicitly presented in Kant’s theoretical philosophy were insufficient to establish a conception of knowledge truly immune to skeptical assault. The chapter begins by examining the difference between ’justification-oriented’ and ’grounding-oriented’ strategies for defeating skepticism. It undertakes to show that the two versions of the Wissenschaftslehre presented prior to 1800 fail to live up to Fichte’s own ’grounding-oriented’ intentions, and why. It is only with the Wissenschaftslehre of 1801/2 that Fichte establishes an approach which allows him to escape from a ’justification-oriented’ model in his attempt to ground the possibility of knowledge.

Bd. 1-2. Vorkritische Schriften.--Bd. 3. Kritik der reinen Vernunft.--Bd. 4. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 1. Aufl. 1781. Prolegomena. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften.--Bd. 5. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Kritik der Urteilskraft.--Bd. 6. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Die Metaphysik der Sitten.--Bd. 7. Der Streit der Fakultäten. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht.--Bd. 8. Abhandlungen nach 1871.--Bd. 9. Logik, Physische Geographie, Pädagogik.

This paper tries to show that one of the main objectives of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to give an epistemological argument for his monistic metaphysics. In its first part, it outlines a traditional, Kant-oriented approach to the question of how we can make sense of our ability to cognize objects. It focuses on the distinction between subjective and objective conditions of cognition and argues that this distinction, understood in the traditional (Kantian) way, is much too poor to do justice to our very elaborated conception of kinds of objects. The second part deals with the Phenomenology. Here it is claimed that Hegel reacts in a sophisticated way to the shortcomings of the traditional epistemological view in presenting a theory which allows us to understand why we have to distinguish between different kinds of objects and how these kinds are related to conditions of cognition. This epistemological doctrine, however, is not developed by Hegel for its own sake. Rather, it has the function of a "transcendentalistic" (not "transcendental") argument for a monistic ontology. Thus, one can make sense of Hegel's claim that the Phenomenology is to be understood as an introduction into his (monistic) System.