New York and London: Routledge (
2024)
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Abstract
The book presents Fichte’s position on free will as a form of compatibilism that has
not yet been explored in the literature. Due to early rationalist convictions,
Fichte is as much concerned with reconciling freedom with a logical and a
theological determinism as he is with a causal determinism. He sees in Kant’s
novel concept of a pure practical reason a new form of rationalism, one
consisting of a system of moral rather than natural necessitating grounds.
At the same time, he adopts a more radically libertarian stance on free
will than Kant. Every member in a sequence of free actions is a “first and
absolute member” and could be other than it is given the same antecedent
natural events and natural laws. The interest of Fichte as a theorist of
freedom lies in how he brings together freedom and predetermination in
a way that challenges our assumption about their mutual exclusivity. The
book provides an overview of Fichte’s philosophical system – the so-called
“Doctrine of Science” – from 1793 to 1800 with the aim of contextualizing
his theory of free agency and destiny. In doing so, it sheds light on how
consideration of these issues in turn shapes the system.