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This paper deals with some fundamental aspects of Fichte’s transcendental account of the body in action, as laid down in the introductory remarks to his 1798 Sittenlehre. Fichte claims that the representation of one’s body is part and parcel of the representation of “first-person” efficacious action or of one’s Wirksamkeit überhaupt. In his view, the latter cannot take place without the former, so that the representation of one’s body is necessarily contained and posited in the representation of one’s Wirksamkeit. Conversely, action – i. e. meine Wirksamkeit – is more than just a particular feature of one’s body among many others: the representation of one’s efficacious action is rather the framework within which the representation of one’s body is formed – it is what constitutes one’s body (my body) as such. This paper tries to zoom in on the very complex set of representations that, according to Fichte, are entailed in the indissoluble unity of this fundamental representation: “my efficacious action/my body”.

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