Fichte, Immanuel Hermann

FICHTE, IMMANUEL HERMANN. - Thinker, b. in Jena on 18 July 1796, d. in Stuttgart on 8 Aug. 1879, son of Johann Gottlieb (v.), whose works he published in an edition. He taught for a short time in Bonn, and then for a long time in Tübingen.

He was the head of the movement known as "speculative theism," which, reacting against Hegelian panlogism and pantheism, tended to reassess the content of the Christian faith in closer relation to natural science and to philosophy, understood as relatively independent of each other. 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 given in the Beiträge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie (Sulzbach 1829; 2nd ed., much enlarged, ibid. 1841), in which a certain influence of Hegelian thought is still noticeable. To these are added the Grundzüge z. System d. Philos. (3 vols., Heidelberg 1835-46; the most important is vol. III: Die spekulative Theologie oder allgemeine Religionlehre). Concluding work: Die theistische Weltanschauung u. ihre Berechtigung (Leipzig 1873). But see also Der neuere Spiritualismus (12 1878), where his conception of spirit is seen to border on spiritism. Many other writings of his deal with psychology, anthropology, ethics, law, etc.