Fichte on Cognition, Knowledge, and Epistemic Value

Contemporary society faces a number of information processing challenges. As human lives and digital technology are increasingly connected, our understanding of how we process information and make decisions must keep pace. Philosophy can help with challenges like AI development or fake news by clarifying what we mean by concepts like “knowledge” or “fact”. This project will explore and reconstruct the thoughts of modern German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fiche on these topics.
Fichte was the immediate intellectual successor of Immanuel Kant. Recent Kant scholarship argues that, for Kant, the central epistemic goal was not knowledge but “Erkenntnis”, a German term without a clear English equivalent. This would be interesting because the concept of Erkenntnis does not even exist in contemporary philosophy. During the research placement, I intend to investigate Fichte’s thoughts about the main aims of information processing and compare them to Kant’s Erkenntnis-centred approach. The project will thereby contribute to a better understanding of the goals we have when processing information, i.e., of our “epistemic values” and how we can promote them. Moreover, it will fill a crucial gap in research on German Idealist philosophy.

Faculty Supervisor:

Owen Ware

Student:

Partner:

University of Cambridge

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: