Fichte-Studien

Volume 44, 2017

Fichte und seine Zeit

Fichte, Skepticism, and the ‘Agrippan Trilemma'

In his recent All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005), Paul Franks defends Maimonian skepticism and explicitly criticizes Fichte’s response to the same. I argue that Franks’ interpretation of Fichte’s response to skepticism is fundamentally flawed in that it ignores or misinterprets the critically important practical/moral dimension of Fichte’s response. I also challenge Franks’ interpretation of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre as a »derivation holistic monism« and argue for a more modest interpretation of the same and one more in keeping with Fichte’s appreciation of the force of philosophical skepticism and the limits of transcendental philosophizing.