In our thesis, we ask whether it is possible to endorse the fundemental insight of the German idealism that knowledge is not a receptive but a spontaneous reality and yet be able to explain the fact that finite subjects are capable to err. In its first part, we discuss Sebastian Rödl's book Self-Consciousness, where he explains error in terms of the subject's passivity in relation to the objects. We show that this explenation is contradictory. In the second part, we discuss Wissenschaftslehre, in which Fichte offers a positive account of error. Fichte claims that the fact of error can only be understood as the product of an immanent contradiction between the absolute and the empirical I.
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