Caleb Kinlaw

According to Fichte, neither antithesis nor synthesis is possible without an absolute thesis, or what he called a thetic judgment. The only examples Fichte offers are ‘I am I’ and ‘self is free’. These judgments are absolute judgments, whereby the subject is neither equated with nor opposed to anything, but simply posited absolutely or as identical to itself. Thetic judgments presuppose no ground of conjunction or distinction, yet formally they seem to assert the identity of the subject and the predicate. If this is so, there must be a third thing by reference to which the two are related. Or, in Fichte’s words, thetic judgements presuppose the requirement for a ground. In the proposition ‘I am I’ the ground of the relation is not present but must be sought as a task. The whole activity of the self is to find this basis. For example, in the proposition ‘self is free’ there is no ground of conjunction or distinction for relating these two concepts, but there is the requirement that the concepts be related. What the Wissenschaftslehre discloses is that these concepts can only be combined in the Idea of a self whose consciousness is determined by nothing outside itself.

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Self-knowledge is intrinsic to Fichte’s ethics as well as his vision for moral self-development and national renewal. I argue that this self-knowledge is performative in the Austinian sense. That is, the immediate self-awareness that an agent, when acting, of herself as the one acting, a self-consciousness that is sufficient to ground self-reference, is a performative awareness. This is the immediate self-consciousness that is intrinsic to self-positing or free self-determination that Fiche summons his auditors and readers to reflectively retrieve. I contend that the performative interpretation discloses further agential awareness that is central to moral self-development and virtuous deliberation.

In this chapter I provide an account of self-positing and the nature of I-hood that challenges the traditional view popularized and defended by Henrich and his followers. I argue that self-positing and I-hood are the foundation for Fichte’s comprehensive theory of rational agency construed to embrace epistemic and practical agency. Accordingly, the chapter includes a sustained critique of Henrich’s (Wildt’s, Tugenhat’s, etc.) contention that Fichte’s theory of subjectivity is grounded in a view of self-positing as strictly and essentially an epistemic self-relation. I argue that self-positing should be read as free, absolute, rational self-determination underlying and underwriting all acts of the I, and that Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre is a theory of free, rational agency. Self-positing, thus, must be interpreted in light of the Fichte’s striving doctrine.

This paper proposes an interpretation of the rainfall example in which Aristotle does not himself think that crop growth is the final cause of rain. The grounds for this interpretation will be an ‘elemental teleology’ which affirms that the only final cause of the movements of the elements is the goal of reaching their proper places of rest. Textual evidence for the presence of this doctrine in Aristotle’s thought is examined in the first two thirds of the paper. My interpretation is then offered along with an argument for why it is both possible and preferable to the alternative reading which claims that Aristotle believed that rain falls for the sake of the crops.

This paper concerns the way in which the transition from negative to positive philosophy is executed in Schelling’s critique of modern philosophy. Schelling’s original insight is that the transition occurs within negative philosophy by means of a twofold experience within philosophical reflection: (1) recognizing the failure of the idealist project of the conceptual determination of Being, and (2) the reversal of the idealist conception of the relation between concepts and their objects. I argue that Schelling uses a form of the ontological argument, focusing on Anselm’s formula aliquid, quo nihil maius cogitari potest, both in his critique of traditional formulations of the argument and to navigate the transition to positive philosophy.

IN HIS EARLY, UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS ON ETHICS, Schleiermacher sketched the framework for a theory of human agency in which he defends a soft determinist view of freedom. He developed his theory as an alternative to noumenal causality, which he had come to reject as inconsistent with a comprehensive scientific conception of the world. Even as a young student, Schleiermacher was convinced that some form of naturalism is inescapable—we are firmly rooted within nature and history—and that, accordingly, our conceptions of morality and religion, to some extent, must be carved out within a naturalistic framework. Naturally, Schleiermacher found transcendental freedom to be an indefensible exception to natural causation and to our interconnectedness with the natural world. Equally important, he found it to be unnecessary for and an obstacle to a sound moral theory. In his early notebooks we find the following entry: “Speculative reason’s concept of transcendental freedom is indispensable only for an otherworldly subject.” Yet, on the first page of his treatise on freedom, Schleiermacher highlights the impasse between Kantian and Leibnizian conceptions of freedom and intimates his dissatisfaction with both theories. The dissatisfaction with Leibniz, though never directly stated, stems from Leibniz’s atomistic conception of causality and inspires Schleiermacher to think seriously about issues in moral psychology which had been ignored or left undeveloped in the Leibnizian and, as it turns out, Kantian views. As we shall see, Schleiermacher discerned that human action originates from a complex constellation.