FICHTE, IMMANUEL HERMANN. - Thinker, b. at Jena on 18 July 1796, d. at Stuttgart on 8 Aug. 1879, son of Johann Gottlieb (v.), whose works he published. He taught for a short time at Bonn, and then for many years at Tubinga.
He was the leader of the movement called “speculative theism,” which, reacting against Hegelian panlogism and pantheism, sought to reassess the content of the Christian faith in a closer relationship with natural science and philosophy, understood as possessing reciprocal relative independence. To this end he founded, in 1837, the journal Zeitschrift f. Philosophie u. spekulative Theologie (from 1847 Zeitschrift f. Philos. u. philos. Kritik). His theoretical position is already set forth in the Beiträge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie (Sulzbach 1829; 2nd ed., greatly enlarged, ibid. 1841), in which a certain influence of Hegelian thought may still be observed. To these may be added the Grundzüge z. System d. Philos. (3 vols., Heidelberg 1835-46; the most important is III: Die spekulative Theologie oder allgemeine Religionlehre). Concluding work: Die theistische Weltanschauung u. ihre Berechtigung (Lapsis 1873). But V. anche Der neuere Spiritualismus (12 1878), where his conception of spirit is seen to verge upon spiritism. Many other writings deal with psychology, anthropology, ethics, law, etc.