System and Freedom in Kant and Fichte

This book investigates various aspects of freedom as developed in the philosophical systems of Kant and Fichte.

Freedom, both Kant and Fichte insist, does not mean that we can choose or think independently from all rules or necessity, but rather that we willingly accept a certain kind of submission under these rules. Therefore, the conditions of our knowledge affect and inform our self-understanding, our willing, and the ways we justify our practical choices. The essays in this volume explore both philosophers’ conceptions of human freedom as they relate to art, history, politics, and religion. They reveal how integrating freedom into a system of thought is crucial for our understanding of modern philosophy.

System and Freedom in Kant and Fichte will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kant, modern philosophy, and German Studies.

Giovanni Pietro Basile studied physics, theology, and philosophy. He did his PhD in Philosophy at the LMU Munich, with a dissertation on Kant’s Opus postumum. He is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of Boston College. Among his main publications are two books on Kant―Transcendance et finitude. La synthèse transcendantale dans la Critique de la raison pure de Kant. With a preface of François Marty, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005, and Kants Opus postumum und seine Rezeption. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013―and several papers on Kant, Karl Jaspers, and Paul Ricœur.

Ansgar Lyssy is currently Researcher at the University of Heidelberg, working on a project on causality in Hegel, funded by a grant from the Thyssen Foundation. In 2020, he finished his Habilitationsschrift at LMU Munich, a yet unpublished monograph titled Humankind and Humanity in Kant. This research was funded by a research grant from the German Research Foundation. Notable publications include Kausalität und Teleologie bei G. W. Leibniz, Stuttgart: Franz-Steiner (Studia Leibnitiana, Special Issue No. 48), 2016, three anthologies on Kant and the philosophy of the eighteenth century, and several papers on Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and other related thinkers.