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The Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions (Texts in German Philosophy)

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Perhaps the clearest exposition of Ficthe's 'Wissenschaftslehre.' An elaborate and logically tight outline of the act of self-consciousness. Fichte is attempting to identify the proposition 'I am I' as the absolute ground of all knowledge. There are amazing developments to critical philosophy in this dense material, though the status of the 'not-I' remains logically obscure. Fichte also takes on all his interlocutors in typically belligerent fashion; although the logical form of his argumentation is precise, he is unable to circumvent the ontological problems that Holderlin would later pose. Still this is more than a transitional footnote between Kant and Hegel-it is an extraordinary tour de force of thinking.

You know when the title is mistranslated that you are in for trouble. "Wissenschaftslehre" is correctly translated as "Doctrine of Science," not "Science of Knowledge." Fichte wants to convince us that there is no thing-in-itself. There is only a phenomenal, appearing, world. Your Ego "posits" itself and creates an image of an external world (an Id). Schopenhauer likened this philosophy to a spider's philosophy. The Ego, like a spider, spins the known world out from itself in the way that a spider spins its web. Was Fichte right? Is there no thing-in-itself?

Comprehensive, deep, perhaps even intellectually orgasimic. The Science of Knowledge contains the most stunning criticisms, elaborations, and evolutions of the Kantian line. Anyone who is disenchanted with modern philsophy and thinks that critical metaphysics is dead should read this book first. Practically every significant problem that is posed in modern philsophy of mind is addressed and solved! Fichte's Transcendental Idealism should become a western Zen Mantra!

Oh yeah, and follow the white rabbit.