Kant and Fichte developed the concept of a worldview as a way of reflecting on experience as a whole. But what does it mean to form a worldview? And what role did it play in the German Idealist tradition? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a detailed analysis of the form of a philosophical worldview and its historical portent, both of which remain unexplored in the literature. The dearth of attention is partially to blame on Kant’s desultory development of it, as well as its place in Fichte’s understudied lectures on religion. In this paper, I first reconstruct Kant’s conception as the starting point and then trace it to Fichte who went on to evolve it further. Fichte endorses the basic conceptual shape pioneered by Kant, namely, a reflective process of positing an idea and then checking the coherence of necessary judgments relative to it. However, Fichte came to realize that its philosophical function needed expanding. Beyond recognizing the possibility for alternative worldviews, Fichte further fleshed out how worldview creation could lead to human flourishing. The common feature between both thinkers is that the formation of a worldview aims to turn philosophy into a life-orienting exercise.

For Kant, ‘wish’ is a technical term denoting a strange species of desire. It is an instance in which someone wills something that she simultaneously knows she cannot bring about. As a result, it is, in one sense, antithetical to morality, which deals with ‘ought implies can’. I will argue that Kant re-evaluated wishing as (to some extent) causally efficacious and, further, of moral relevance. This re-evaluation has not been discussed in the literature, yet has been lurking in plain sight in a subtle shift in two versions of a footnote from the Critique of the Power of Judgement.

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The goal of this paper is to clarify the role ‘wrong’ plays in Hegel’s system of right, as both a form of freedom and the transition to morality. Two approaches will be examined to explore wrong in practical philosophical terms: First, one could take the transition to bedescriptivein nature. The transition describes wrong as a realized fact of the human condition that one inherits from the outset. Second, one could see it asprescriptive. Actual wrongdoing would be essential for the subject’s progression tobecoming moral. Though both are most likely the case, emphasis is given to the latter since it represents the actualization of potential. Furthermore, it will be suggested that wrong plays a similar role as that which alienation does in thePhenomenology of Spirit; both bridge the will as abstract personality with the moral point of view.