ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Fichte’s views in the first of the two-stage development of his theory of freedom in the Jena period. This stage, which lasted from his conversion to Kantianism to his founding of the Doctrine of Science, saw an increasing exposure to the works of contemporary friends and foes of the Kantian philosophy. It first investigates the first attempt at a “Theory of the Will” which Fichte adds as the opening chapter to the second edition of Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation and the deduction of God as ground of the universal enforcement of the moral law, that is, the congruency of our fortune with our moral conduct, in the following chapter. It then goes on to discuss two reviews which Fichte wrote on behalf of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, where he defines his position against Reinhold’s theory of free choice, Schmid’s intelligible fatalism, as well as Gebhard’s defense of Kantian deontology against moral sentimentalism.
