Consciousness and Self-Consciousness from Wolff to Reinhold

Abstract

Abstract Consciousness and self-consciousness are central issues in eighteenth-century German philosophy. Several thinkers, especially towards the end of the century, considered them fundamental to philosophical thought as such. In light of the massive amount of material eighteenth-century philosophy provides on the subject, a main focus of this chapter is on a theme that plays a pivotal role in many discussions of consciousness from Christian Wolff through to Kant and post-Kantian philosophy: self-consciousness and its relation to the consciousness of objects. The chapter begins with an account of the Leibnizian background, followed by a discussion of Christian Wolff and his critics, such as Rüdiger, Feder, Tetens, and Lossius. A central section deals with Kant’s account of empirical and ‘pure’ self-consciousness. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and argues that there are important connections and continuities between post- and pre-Kantian thinking about consciousness and self-consciousness.