Michihito Yoshime

This chapter considers how we should locate Fichtean selfhood in philosophy after the linguistic turn. The reevaluation and reconstruction of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre seems as yet insufficient, although the problem of selfhood understood in terms of the Tathandlung, which was not fully developed until Fichte, still matters for philosophy. On closer inspection, at least one contemporary Fichtean philosophy of language can be found, namely, the transcendental pragmatics of Karl-Otto Apel. What is significant here is that the rehabilitation or reconstruction of Fichtean thought must be made not in terms of a philosophy of consciousness but of the philosophy of language. Fichtean selfhood, understood in terms of the Tathandlung, is to underlay human speech and communication, if philosophy of language is to be prima philosophia.