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In summer term 1812 Fichte lectured on “the relation of logic with real philosophy” in order to introduce the point of view of the Science of Knowledge. A few months before the beginning of Fichte’s lectures, the first book of Hegel’s Science of Logic had been published. Independently of the controversial question if Fichte’s ‘Transcendental Logic’ from 1812 was intended to be a critical reply to the Hegelian project of a speculative logic, no doubt the lecture from summer 1812 is an important source for understanding the systematical relation between the late Fichte’s conception of transcendental logic and the Hegelian project of a speculative logic. The principal thesis of this paper is that both the convergences and differences between the two philosophical projects can be identified by considering the conceptions of the concept and of self-consciousness that are contained in Fichte’s lecture and in the third part of Hegel’s Lógic, the Doctrine of Concept. The comparison between these conceptions shows that the late Fichte and Hegel converge insofar as they criticize the logical conception of concepts and the idea that self-consciousness is a fundamental principle of philosophy. However, whereas Fichte defends a genetic theory of conceptual content and of self-consciousness that is based on the conception of an absolutely spontaneous and ‘image’-producing thinking, Hegel searches for a structural explanation that is based on the speculative conception of the concept as the fundamental structure of reality, understanding concepts in the logical sense as a result of the ‘separation’ of the original unity of the concept and self-consciousness as its conscious concretization.

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