Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Idealism

Abstract

The eighteenth-century German physicist, philosopher, and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) is well known for his objection to the substantial view of the self, but his thoughts on idealism and the relationship of his views to the positions of his philosophical predecessors are less familiar. I argue that Lichtenberg’s empiricism leads him to maintain a form of idealism according to which objects for us are only representations, and I show how this position relates to his linguistic idealism and his coherentist theory of truth. Seen in this light, Lichtenberg makes an important, if unacknowledged, contribution to the history of German philosophy distinct from later German idealism.