Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Gesamtausgabe / Reihe IV: Kollegnachschriften. Band 3: Kollegnachschriften 1794–1799

Since the appearance of Volume IV,2, six new lecture transcripts have been discovered, a fact that justifies a chronological break in series IV. Accordingly, this volume includes a transcript by Kasper Lavater of Fichte’s first five lectures Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre, which were delivered in Lavater’s living room in the spring of 1794. Fichte’s first lectures on Natural Law [Naturrecht] are documented in a fragmentary transcript from the literary remains of Fichte’s student Johann Smidt, who later became a politician in Bremen. Also included in this volume is a rough and unrevised transcript of Fichte’s Platner lectures on Logic and Metaphysics from 1796/97, from the papers of Friedrich August Eschen (1776–1800) discovered in Eutin, as well as a fragmentary transcript, from the same source, of the 1796/97 ›Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo‹. The literary remains of the Swedish philosopher Benjamin Karl Henrik Höijer (1767–1812) contains a Swedish transcript of Fichte’s Platner lectures from August and September 1798. This transcript is here published for the first time in its entirety, along with a German translation of the same. The primary text included in this volume, however, is the transcript of the 1798/99 ›Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo‹, by Karl Friedrich Krauses (1780–1829), which was discovered in Dresden in 1980. This is a text that dramatically improves our understanding of the second phase of Fichte’s pedagogic activity in Jena.