28. Oktober 2024
CfP: Fichte’s Political Thought and its Legacy.
History, State and Politics in the Doctrine of the State
Edited by Jeffrey Church and Silvestre Gristina
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, by virtue of its foundational practical principle, demands a critique of the existing state of affairs and a vocation to transform it. This implies an intimate relationship with empirical and material reality, with which philosophy is called to interact productively. According to Fichte, philosophy is therefore called upon to “apply” itself or to become “applied”, i.e. to make itself effective in reality by modifying its existing structures. To the sphere of Fichte’s “applied philosophy” belong the areas of his thought relating to right, history and politics, as well as education, economics, and so on. These areas, however, are not mere appendages to the Wissenschaftslehre, but rather epistemologically foundational moments of the entire Fichtean philosophical open system. These are the places where transcendental philosophy as a practice affects and reshapes reality by changing socio-political structures. Fichte’s concepts of the state, law and politics are therefore not to be seen as boundary problems within the philosopher’s reflections, but as some of his systematic elements.
Building on this general framework, and on the occasion of the forthcoming publication of the English translation of the Staatslehre (J. G. Fichte, The Doctrine of the State, edited by Jeffrey Church and Anna Marisa Schön, Oxford: Oxford University Press, November 2024), this issue of Fichte-Studien aims to reflect on Fichte’s legal, economic and political thought and its legacy. The issue aims to devote a first part to essays about Fichte’s Staatslehre, the relationship of this work to other phases of Fichte’s philosophical development, and its reception by other authors in the 19th and 20th centuries. A second, more general section will then be devoted to Fichte’s social and political thought, including its influence in his own time and beyond. The issue will be rounded off by a section devoted to a book symposium on the new translation of the Staatslehre, for which contributions can be submitted discussing the interpretive and translational choices made by the editors.
Proposals for papers may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:
– Themes, concepts and interpretations of Fichte’s Staatslehre;
– The Staatslehre in relation to its historical context and the specific phase of the theoretical elaboration of the Wissenschaftslehre in general;
– The legacy of the Staatslehre in the 19th and 20th centuries (history of its reception and its philosophical and cultural effects);
– Continuities and differences in Fichte’s political and social thought between the Jena and Berlin phases;
– Reception and effects of Fichte’s social and political thought in his time (debates; reviews; uses);
– Fichte’s philosophy of history and its relevance for his conception of education, law and politics.
Essays lenhght: 6000 words
Deadline for abstracts: 31.12.2024
Submission deadline for essays: 31.05.2025
Publication: November 2025
Information Contact: silvestre.gristina@unife.it