Die Anthropologie der Aufklärung und Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre

The aim of the paper is to find a new sense of anthropology within the philosophical discussion of early German Idealism. To this end the focus is directed especially to Fichte’s Doctrine of Science and to its attemps to consider first the anthropological topic from a transcendental point of view and therefore to transform it in relation to previous conceptions proposed by some exponents of the Kantian school as well as by some authors of German Enlightenment. Fichte proposes three definitions of anthropology: 1) as a theoretical discipline dealing with the connection of body and soul; 2) as a science of the human being with respect to its moral destination; 3) as a trascendental field whose purpose it is to identify to what extent and in which sense reason can know itself. It is shown that the old forms of anthropologies are thereby clearly redefined. The old concepts undergo a simplification, i. e. unification as well as a speculative reduction. Fichte’s Doctrine of Science can thus absorb some aspects of the precritical theories on mankind and also use them in order to overcome speculative tensions marking Kant’s critical philosophy.