1st Edition
Fichte's Transcendental Ontology The Cultivation of Intellectual Intuition
1 Kant and Reinhold’s Doctrine of Self-Affection and Its Transcendental-Ontological Implications 2 From Free Play to Self-feeling 3 Fichte and Schelling in Parallel 4 Absolute Being as Distanceless Unity of Subject-Object 5 Annihilation and Genesis of Being 6 The Genesis of the Philosophy of History 7 “A Lone Swan’s Solitary Flight Across the Void”
Biography
Ni Yicai is one of the ZJU 100 Young Professors at the School of Marxism and Institute for Foreign Philosophy, Zhejiang University. He received his PhD in Classical German Philosophy from Peking University in 2021. He has been recognized with the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award from both Peking University (2021) and Beijing Municipality (2022), as well as the Shi-Heng Young Scholar Research Award (2024) and the Zhejiang Young Social Science Scholar Research Award (2025). His research focuses on transcendental philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, specializing in German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel), Western Marxism (Lukács), and Russian Émigré Philosophy (S. Frank and I. Ilyin).
“Ni Yicai has taken a topic that has been extensively covered and found something new to say about it. Taking Fichte’s early Wissenschaftslehre as constituting in fact a “transcendental ontology” of the thinking, acting “I”, he then traces the reception of this not as ending with Schelling and Hegel but as extending through the nineteenth and twentieth century, even deeply into Russian philosophy. He gives us a new way of seeing Fichte’s philosophy and its historical impact.”
Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University, USA
“The book by Ni Yicai, entitled Transcendental Philosophy as Transcendental Ontology, from the Genesis of the Transcendental I to the History of Being, offers an original and persuasive investigation aimed at demonstrating the contemporary relevance of transcendental philosophy. Starting from an innovative reading of Fichte and his concept of “intellectual intuition,” the volume engages with figures of twentieth-century Neo-Kantianism (Lask, Lukács, and Hirsch) as well as important representatives of 20th Century Russian philosophy (Ivan Ilyin), showing how transcendental philosophy constitutes an “ontology of subjectivity” that makes it possible to develop a philosophy of history in a contemporary key.”
Gaetano Rametta, University of Padova, Italy
