Fichte, Johann Gottlieb(1762–1814)
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 eastern Germany). Through the support of local benefactors, he received an education that would have been beyond the means of his family, who were ribbon weavers. He attended the Princely Latin School at Porta (Schulpforta) (1774–1780), studied theology and law at the universities of Jena, Wittenberg, and Leipzig under difficult financial circumstances and without taking a degree (1780–1784), and served as a private tutor in Leipzig, Eastern Prussia, and Zurich (1785–1793).
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