 In order to construct any genuine philosophy of freedom, maintained Fichte, the reality of freedom itself must simply be presupposed and thus treated as an incontrovertible “fact of reason” in the Kantian sense. This, of course, is not to deny the possibility of raising skeptical, theoretically grounded objections to such claims; on the contrary, it was the very impossibility of any theoretically satisfactory refutation of skepticism concerning the reality of freedom that led Fichte to affirm the inescapable “primacy of the practical” with respect to the selection of one’s philosophical starting point.