ABSTRACT
As with the English “consciousness” (ultimately derived from the Latin con-, “together,” and scire, “to know”), the Danish term has at vide, “to know,” at its root. As the etymology suggests, consciousness is understood as a state of knowing awareness. The term is used both of a form of global awareness (“he regained consciousness”) and also of awareness directed towards specific intentional objects (“consciousness of...”). In its modern sense, the term is actually a fairly recent arrival in European languages and does not appear to be attested in Danish until the nineteenth century,1 following the explicit thematization of Bewusstheit in German thought.
