The science of rights;: Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre;

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte

English, German (translation)

505 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Like Descartes and Kant before him, the problem of subjectivity and consciousness motivated much of his philosophical rumination. Fichte also wrote political philosophy, and is thought of by some as the father of German nationalism.
His son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, was also a renowned philosopher.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an application of Kant's philosophy to natural law. In my opinion, Hegel will take a much better shot at this a few years later. At the center of this is the entire German Idealism with its focus on reason, free will, strong state, ground, and similar. I really liked the centrality and explicitness of the philosophical ground/grounded in this book - and here are a few examples of it: “the grounded is not possible without the ground”, “when the ground ceases, so does the grounded”, “the grounded extends no further than the ground”, “when the ground falls away, so also does the grounded”, and a lot more variations of this. The first part is a deduction of the rights from the philosophical concepts of German Idealism; while the second part is an actual construction and justification of institutions like state, constitution, and laws that embody these rights. It is interesting to notice how much stayed the same and how little it changed over the last 250 years. The appendix about sexes, marriage, and the associated rights will irritate a contemporary feminist.