Johann Gottlieb Fichte

I'm enjoying reading (short extracts of) Fichte, a philosopher sometimes considered as the bridge between Kant and Hegel. Fichte more or less does away with Kant's distinction between apriori and a posteriori (although his notion of a limitation - Anstoss - comes, I understand, to play something like the role of Kant's thing-in-itself). Instead, he is the first idealist to move everything back inside the imagination (the realm of 'free', not 'determined' thinking), and to posit a unity of self-consciousness. In other words, Fichte does not rely on anything outside the 'I' to prove the validity of the 'I', or what Fichte calls the subject-object.

A second interesting thing is that Fichte, far in advance of Durkheim (or Simmel...?) argued that self-consciousness was a social phenomenon. In other words, one's own self-consciousness does not exist without the self-consciousness of other rational thinking beings. Much more to grasp here, I expect, but an interesting start.