We are glad to give notice of the Conference Fichte’s Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of History, which will take place on October 24th-25th, 2025, at the New School for Social Research, New York (63 5th Ave., Room UL105 New York NY 10003).
Keynotes: Angelica Nuzzo (CUNY), Günter Zöller (LMU).
Organization: Leksa Zhang (NSSR); Gregor Schäfer (University of Basle/University of London).
Below you can find the description and the program of the event.
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Description
The truth that Fichte’s systematic conception of transcendental philosophy methodologically aims at – as elaborated in the different versions of his Doctrine of Science [Wissenschaftslehre] from the early Jena period to the later Berlin period – is an eternal, absolute, unchangeable, as such a-historical truth: it is a universal principle that self-consciousness makes explicit in the reflexive act of its liberation from the external givenness of all particular circumstances – interrupting, as an evident insight, the historical burden of entire centuries like a lightning flash. The historical science, accordingly, as it deals with the dispersed mass of empirical facts, is polemically rejected by Fichte – as Friedrich Schlegel reports about a conversation he had with him – as the meaningless business of “counting little peas.” At the same time, as Fichte makes clear from the outset, he understands the systematic work on his doctrine as intrinsically connected with the paradigmatic historical-political events and struggles of this epoch, namely, the French Revolution and its ongoing consequences and challenges. The philosophical liberation from dogmatism — which Fichte considers to be the great irreversible achievement of Kant’s transcendental revolution — insofar as it finds its equivalent in the setting of the event of a political revolution, fosters persistent resistance and self-determination in the historical world. Fichte’s political philosophy and philosophy of history, in line with this, must be understood as an immanent dimension of his overall systematic conception: the founding act of the Doctrine of Science — the I’s self-positing — is in itself a genuinely practical act; and by performing its realization and transformation through all the stages of Fichte’s system, the I opens up to an encounter with difference and otherness, which are essential for intersubjectivity and the constitution of a political-ethical community as well as for emancipatory action bringing about historical change and novelty. It thus is precisely out of its systematic-methodological immanence as transcendental philosophy that, for Fichte, philosophy forces a transition to the dimension of history, enabling political action and engagement that ‘apply’ the universal principle to concrete historical configurations. History – as the field in which political action becomes possible as embodying universality under particular, nationally and culturally determined conditions – represents the infinite process that, whilst a priori deducible as the place in which the ideal aim of reason’s ‘world plan’ approaches its realization, is also the place in which unforeseen events of liberation — a new future — can break into the world.
In Fichte’s philosophy, accordingly, the dimension of history and its multiple entanglements and conjunctures with figures of political action are present throughout. Being an implicit reference already in his early writings on the French Revolution and thematized in terms of the relation between a priori construction and aposteriority in the different versions of his Doctrine of Science as well as in his dealing with the religious concept of revelation, philosophy of history explicitly emerges as a topic in Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation [Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten] and, most prominently, in The Characteristics of the Present Age [Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters] and finds, in many different aspects, further implicit and explicit elaborations in Fichte’s political philosophy – such as in The Closed Commercial State [Der geschlossene Handelsstaat], On Machiavelli [Über Machiavelli], the Addresses to the German Nation [Reden an die deutsche Nation], or in The Doctrine of the State [Die Staatslehre]. Systematically and methodologically, the project of a philosophy of history hereby addresses the question of how to connect a priori foundationalism with the specifically historical forms of particularity and singularity, along with the problem of how to integrate reflexivity, discontinuity, and the novelty of history’s future on the one hand with tradition, continuity, and history’s origin (as personified as the ‘Urvolk’) on the other hand, and, furthermore, how to conceptualize the logic and temporality of historical progress from this structure. Politically, this implies the question of how to think, promote, and further develop and specify emancipatory subjectivity and responsible action in concrete historical situations and to answer to the challenges of ongoing social conflicts and their complex dynamics in the tension-filled epoch after the French Revolution, i.e., in the life of modernity and its normative claim to autonomy.
Program
24th October
(63 5th Av, University Center, L105)
9:30-10:00
Gregor Schäfer (London/Basel): Introduction
10:00-11:30
Lea Schwab (Zurich): The Concept Lives: Fichte’s Theory of the Concept Between Systematic Thought and Historicity
Emmanuel Chaput (Laval): The Tribunal of History: A Fichtean Response
13:00-15:15
Dakota Wade (Virginia): Myth, Modernity, and the Eternal Revolution of the Present in Fichte’s Characteristics of the Present Age (1804/5)
Manuel Tangorra (Leuven): Enacting Communities: Fichte’s Late Theory of Historical and Political Agency
Silvestre Gristina (Padua/UC Santa Cruz): Transcendental Philosophy and Praxis: Fichte’s Legacy in Young Hegelians, between Revolution and Socialism
16:30-18:00
Günter Zöller (LMU): Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Fichte’s Late Doctrine of the State Between Spinoza and Hegel
25th October
(6 E 16th Street, D1103 Wolff Conference Room)
10:00-11:30
Goran Vranešević (Kyoto): The Bond of Imagination: From A Priori Freedom to Historical Praxis in Fichte’s Republic of Scholars
Emiliano Acosta (Antwerp): Revisiting Fichte’s Concept of People through the Lens of Laclau’s Populism Theory
13:00-14:30
Matthew Delhey (Toronto): Fichte’s World-Historical University
Qinyi Luo (UC Riverside): Kant, Fichte, and the Idea of a Universal History
15:00-16:30
Jason Maurice Yonover (Yale): King on “Something Quite Sublime” in Fichte
Marie Louise Krogh (Leiden): A Relation Grounded in neither Right nor Fairness: Fichte on Colonization and European Hegemony in Trade
17:00-18:30
Angelica Nuzzo (CUNY): Fichte’s Conception of History: A Priori Foundation and Material Development
For further information, please visit the website of the event.
