This book investigates various aspects of freedom as developed in the philosophical systems of Kant and Fichte. Freedom, both Kant and Fichte insist, does not mean that we can choose or think independently from all rules or necessity, but rather that we willingly accept a certain kind of submission under these rules. Therefore, the conditions of our knowledge affect and inform our self-understanding, our willing, and the ways we justify our practical choices. The essays in this volume explore both philosophers’ conceptions of human freedom as they relate to art, history, politics, and religion. They reveal how integrating freedom into a system of thought is crucial for our understanding of modern philosophy. System and Freedom in Kant and Fichte will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kant, modern philosophy, and German Studies.

Daniel Breazeale presents a critical study of the early philosophy of J. G. Fichte, and the version of the Wissenschaftslehre that Fichte developed between 1794 and 1799. He examines what Fichte was trying to accomplish and how he proposed to do so, and explores the difficulties implicit in his project and his strategies for overcoming them.

Fichte's System of Ethics, originally published in 1798, is at once the most accessible presentation of its author's comprehensive philosophical project, The Science of Knowledge or Wissenschaftslehre, and the most important work in moral philosophy written between Kant and Hegel. This study integrates the discussion of our moral duties into the systematic framework of a transcendental theory of the human subject. Ranging over numerous important philosophical themes, the volume offers a new translation of the work together with an introduction that sets it in its philosophical and historical contexts.

In this study of Fichte's social and political philosophy, David James offers an interpretation of Fichte's most famous writings in this area, including his Foundations of Natural Right and Addresses to the German Nation, centred on two main themes: property and virtue. These themes provide the basis for a discussion of such issues as what it means to guarantee the freedom of all the citizens of a state, the problem of unequal relations of economic dependence between states, and the differences and connections between the legal and political sphere of right and morality. James also relates Fichte's central social and political ideas to those of other important figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Kant and Hegel, as well as to the radical phase of the French Revolution. His account will be of importance to all who are interested in Fichte's philosophy and its intellectual and political context.

The Free Development of Each collects twelve essays on the history of German philosophy by Allen W. Wood, one of the leading scholars in the field. They explore moral philosophy, politics, society, and history in the works of Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, and share the basic theme of freedom, as it appears in morality and in politics. All of the essays have been re-edited and revised for this collection, and five are previously unpublished. They are accompanied by an Introduction which sets out the central, philosophical viewpoint of the volume, and a comprehensive bibliography.

The theologians of the late German Enlightenment saw in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a new rational defence of their Christian faith. In fact, Kant's critical theory of meaning and moral law totally subverted the spirit of that faith. This challenging new study examines the contribution made by the Critique of Pure Reason to this change of meaning. George di Giovanni stresses the revolutionary character of Kant's critical thought but also reveals how this thought was being held hostage to unwarranted metaphysical assumptions that caused much confusion and rendered the First Critique vulnerable to being reabsorbed into modes of thought typical of Enlightenment popular philosophy. Amongst the striking features of this book are nuanced interpretations of Jacobi and Reinhold, a lucid exposition of Fichte's early thought, and a rare, detailed account of Enlightenment popular philosophy.

This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. Isaac Nakhimovsky shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau's constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant's social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. Nakhimovsky argues that Fichte's sequel to Rousseau and Kant's writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the pacification of the West. Fichte claimed that Europe could not transform itself into a peaceful federation of constitutional republics unless economic life could be disentangled from the competitive dynamics of relations between states, and he asserted that this disentanglement required transitioning to a planned and largely self-sufficient national economy, made possible by a radical monetary policy. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed "national self-sufficiency." Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, Nakhimovsky concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.

This new interpretation of Fichte's Jena system focuses on the problem of the objectivity of consciousness.

In the light of growing political and religious fundamentalism, this open access book defends the idea of freedom as paramount for the attempt to find common ethical ground in the age of globality. The book sets out to examine as yet unexhausted ways to boost the resilience of the principle of liberalism. Critically reviewing the last 200 years of the philosophy of freedom, it revises the principle of liberty in order to revive it. It discusses many different aspects that fall under its three main topics: the metaphysics of freedom, quantitative freedom and qualitative freedom. Open societies worldwide have come under increasing pressure in the last decades. The belief that politics and markets fare best when guided by the principle of liberty presently faces multiple challenges such as terrorism, climate warming, inequality, populism, and financial crises. In the view of its critics, the idea of freedom no longer offers adequate guidance to meet these challenges and should be partially corrected or even entirely replaced by countervailing values. Against the reduction of freedom to the merely quantitative question as to how much liberties individuals call their own, this book draws attention to the qualitative concerns which and whose opportunities society should foster. It argues that, correctly understood, the idea of liberty commits us to defend as well as advance the freedom of each and every world citizen.

Freedom is one of the main issues of modern philosophy and Kant’s philosophy of freedom a major source for comprehending it. Whereas in contemporary debates Kant’s concept of practical freedom is addressed frequently, the cosmological foundation of it is much less discussed and even mostly taken for granted. In Metaphysics of Freedom?, by contrast, Kant’s concept of cosmological freedom is scrutinized both in a historical and a systematic perspective. As a result, a deeper and broader understanding of Kant’s conception of freedom, its presuppositions, and problems emerges.