Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. The most original and most influential thinker among the immediate successors of Immanuel Kant, Fichte was the first exponent of German idealism. He set the agenda for the philosophical work of the generation of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and exerted tremendous influence on German cultural life in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. Fichte undertook pioneering philosophical work on a number of topics, including the primacy of the practical over the theoretical, the nature and development of self-consciousness, the status and function of one's own body, the original discovery of the other person, the integration of freedom and nature, and the separation of law and morality.

Life

Fichte was born on May 19, 1762, in the village of Rammenau in Saxony (in today's...