 J. H. Stirling once quipped that “Fichte had two philosophical epochs; and if both belong to biography, only one belongs to history,” and until quite recently there was a great deal of truth to this observation. Indeed, even today, Fichte’s technical writings of the post-Jena period remain little-known to the vast majority of philosophers. Admittedly, it is hard to recognize these late texts—which drop the strategy of beginning with an analysis of the self, along with the strong emphasis upon the “primacy of the practical,” and which include unembarrassed references to an apparently transcendent “absolute” (“Being,” “Absolute Being,” “God”)—as the work of the same author who wrote the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. Though Fichte himself always insisted that his basic philosophy remained the same, no matter how much his presentation thereof may have altered over the years, many sympathetic readers and not a few well-informed scholars have found it impossible to reconcile this claim with what at least appear to be the profound systematic and doctrinal differences between the “early” and “late” Wissenschaftslehre. It is therefore not surprising that the problematic “unity” of Fichte’s thought continues to be vigorously debated by experts in the field.