Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Phenomenology of spirit, the science of the experience of consciousness
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart to a treasury official. From 1788 to 1793 he studied at the Tübingen Theological Seminary. His classmates and friends were Hölderlin and Schelling, the future poet and philosopher. Hegel preferred to work as a private tutor first in Bern, then in Frankfurt, to a spiritual career. In 1801, Hegel came to Jena, defended his dissertation “On the Orbits of the Planets” for the title of Privatdozent and began lecturing at the university. The professorial chair at the University of Jena was occupied at that time by Schelling, with whom Hegel actively collaborated on the jointly published “Critical Journal of Philosophy” and was clearly influenced by whose transcendental philosophy he was in the first years of his stay at the university.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Science and science of sciences. Me and not-Me
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in Rammenau in 1762 and studied at the universities of Jena and Leipzig. Without receiving a degree, he worked for some time as a tutor in Zurich. The turning point in Fichte’s fate was his acquaintance with the works of Kant in 1790. He immediately felt like a Kantian and began to seek a meeting with the author of his favorite philosophical system. The meeting took place in July 1791, but Kant showed no enthusiasm and Fichte was disappointed. Nevertheless, he still managed to gain the approval of the famous philosopher. In 1792, he anonymously (though not intentionally) published the work “An Essay on the Critique of Every Revelation”, written in the spirit of criticism and accepted by many as the work of Kant himself.