Ep. 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte's Transcendental Idealism (Part One)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark Linsenmayer

Casey, Paskin, Philosophy, Linsenmayer, Society & Culture, Alwan

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II. What is reality?

Fichte's armchair journey starts him considering nature and thus himself as determined, but then he backtracks to say that actually, experience doesn't tell us whether we're determined or free. In Book II, he argues that since our experience is always of something going on in ourselves, then causality, the external world, the self, etc. must be our own mental creations. So we're free after all, yet everything is drained of significance!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Parsley Exam in Life, a podcast by some guys who had one point
0:11.4	said on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it.
0:14.6	Our questions for episode 271 are something like, what is reality and how do we know it
0:19.2	to be so?
0:20.2	And we read books one and two of Johann Gottlieb Fichter's book, The Vocation of Man,
0:25.8	from 1799.
0:27.6	For more information, please visit ParsleyExaminedLife.com.
0:30.8	This is Mark Linsonmeyer, perceiving the quality of our podcast, but a next thing, a bunch of
0:35.7	extra quality in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:38.4	This is Seth Paskin, having a midnight dialogue with a wondrous spirit in Austin, Texas.
0:44.8	This is Wes All-One in one sense in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but in another, I just am Cambridge
0:52.4	Massachusetts.
0:53.4	And this is Dylan Casey, being that which I am because in this particular position of
0:58.6	the great system of nature, only such a person as I am absolutely and no other is possible
1:04.1	in Middleton, Wisconsin.
1:06.4	You would be the determinist.
1:11.1	Which Fichter finds revolting.
1:14.9	I feel like I often have these midnight communications with three spirits designed to
1:20.0	rake me from my aren't ways, but it's just another episode of the ParsleyExaminedLife.
1:25.4	Which one of you is the spirit of Christmas future?
1:27.8	The spirit is kind of an asshole in this.
1:33.0	Neither of them comes off well.
	...

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