Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

A key figure in the movement of German Idealism, J.G. Fichte is often read as a thinker who formed a bridge between the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. and the speculative idealism of G.W.F. Hegel. The discovery of Kant’s philosophy, occurring shortly after Fichte terminated his studies in theology at the University of Jena, was a watershed moment in Fichte’s own intellectual development. His first book, An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), published anonymously, achieved him fame when it was revealed that he was the author and not Kant, as many had presumed. Though inspired, Fichte was aware of the shortcomings of Kant’s enterprise, and sensitive to the critiques it received concerning various subjects, from the elusive ‘thing-in-itself’ to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. His Foundations of Natural Right (1796/97) in particular developed a philosophy of law and social philosophy that emphasized the primacy of the latter category. Martial Gueroult explores the sources of Fichte’s concept of ‘nature’ in volume six of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, and Jacques Bouveresse develops a more substantial critique of this aspect of Fichte’s thought in the same volume. The last decade of Fichte’s life was his most productive and consisted of a series of courses delivered in Berlin; his Address to the German Nation (1808), given during the French occupation, would be a foundational text for the trajectory of German nationalism. At the core of Fichte’s thought was the primacy of the self-positing ego, a position developed in the ambitious Wissenschaftslehre, a doctrine of science grounded in the thorough-going subjectivity of the ‘pure I’, that Fichte revised throughout his career and in which he sought to ground all his writings. The auto-positional nature of Fichtean subjectivity, and its implications for a doctrine of science, is addressed in the Cahiers in a key article by Jacques-Alain Miller.and further developed - though Fichte remains unnamed - in François Regnault’s ‘Dialectque d’épistémologies’.