Jacobi famously contended that Fichte’s transcendental philosophy ultimately leads to metaphysical nihilism, while Fichte himself continued to see a close harmony between the Wissenschaftslehre and Jacobi’s thought. This chapter explores a middle path between these positions in the writings of the two philosophers.

Chapter 1 offers a first and preliminary outline of Kant’s accounts of reason and metaphysics and introduces various themes that will be developed further in later chapters of the book. In particular, Kant’s conception of reason as a cognitive faculty is distinguished from reason as a system of principles and Kant’s distinctions between reason and pure reason, between theoretical and practical reason, and between the logical and the real use of reason is introduced and related to other conceptions of reason from the history of philosophy. Moreover, Kant’s conception of metaphysics as purely rational cognition as well as its major divisions (such as that between metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals and between metaphysics as a science and as a natural predisposition) are discussed.