Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Gesamtausgabe / Reihe II: Nachgelassene Schriften. Band 7: Nachgelassene Schriften 1804–1805

With the exception of the lectures on the ›Wissenschaftslehre‹ from the summer of 1804 (contained in Vol. II/8), the volume contains all of the additional versions of the ›Wissenschaftslehre‹ composed prior to Fichte's departure for Erlangen. The ›Wissenschaftslehre‹ of the winter of 1804, which Fichte delivered before an audience consisting of Berlin's leading personalities from the government, the sciences, and the arts, marks his resumption of his activities as a teacher, which had been interrupted since 1802. In these lectures he exhaustively presented, in the form of a philosophia prima, the relationship of appearance to the absolute as a successive process free of all empirical-factual presuppositions. In this manner the objections of Fries were deprived of their force, and the transcendental standpoint was vindicated against Schelling. In the third ›Wissenschaftslehre‹ of 1804 and in the attached ›Prinzipien der Gottes-, Sitten- und Rechtslehre‹ Fichte completed his account of the self-development of appearances in connection with his philosophia prima. This volume also includes a few shorter writings on theology and pedagogy and concerning the concept of the Wissenschaftslehre.