German · German philosophy and later psychology
Bewusstsein
Heard as buh-VOOST-zine
- Period
- eighteenth century onward
- Semantic range
- Consciousness as a philosophical and psychological term, distinct from Gewissen.
- What it can mean
- Awareness, self-consciousness in the German Idealist and later scientific vocabularies.
- What it should not be equated with
- Not evidence that all European languages split the same way at the same time. French did not.
- Primary or early source
- Eighteenth-century German philosophical prose.
- Scholarly source
- SEP seventeenth-century theories notes the later German distinction.
- Relation to other terms
- A later linguistic cousin of the English split, not its copy.