The “Mathematical” Wissenschaftslehre
The “Mathematical” Wissenschaftslehre
On a Late Fichtean Reflection of Novalis
This chapter argues that in his late writings Novalis (1772–1801) was one of the first thinkers to positively grasp the underlying mathematicity of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. In a neo-Platonistic sense, both Novalis and Fichte acknowledged that mathematical and geometrical methods should form an ideal for all scientific philosophy, and that a proper philosophy of mathematics must take into account the intellectual activity of the mathematician. These elements of Fichte’s system only became more widely recognized in the twentieth century by philosophers of mathematics such as Hermann Weyl, Andreas Speiser, and Jules Vuillemin. This may be considered as a belated but independent confirmation of Novalis’s original insights on the relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.
Keywords: Fichte, Novalis, mathematics, geometry, philosophical romanticism, German idealism, Wissenschaftslehre
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