The aim of this paper is to contribute to a grasp of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. In this respect, I will be making two related points. Neither Fichte nor anyone else is a transcendental philosopher in the full sense of the term. This means that the very idea of transcendental philosophy should be understood regulatively but not constitutively since it has not and probably cannot be fully realized. Further Fichte should be read as presenting a radical restatement of the critical philosophy that ends in an apparent paradox between two modes of cognitive explanation, whose difference is masked through Hegel’s description of both Kant and Fichte as subjective idealists: in short either explanation through the interaction of both subject and object, or again through the subject only.