From Monads to the I (Departmental Seminar)

Abstract:

The talk traces how Fichte’s early transcendental philosophy took shape through Leibniz’s legacy as mediated by Ernst Platner, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Salomon Maimon. Platner’s moderate rationalism reframed Leibniz within an empirical anthropology, steering Fichte toward embodied self-awareness and a dynamic ontology of forces tempered by critical caution. Jacobi, while selectively adopting Leibniz, insisted on the primacy of immediate experience, compelling Fichte to ground idealism in a self-evident starting point rather than derivation. Maimon, in a post-Kantian key, critically rehabilitated Leibniz by treating monads and petites perceptions as regulative fictions while retaining innate structures and the principle of sufficient reason as methodological ideals. Through these mediations, Fichte assimilated and transformed Leibnizian commitments—monadic activity, petites perceptions, pre-established harmony, and innate capacities—ultimately recasting them within his own transcendental idealist framework.

Delivered in English.
All are welcome.