Abstract
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born, as the eighteenth child, in Ober-Ramstadt, a small village not far from Darmstadt, in 1742. His father, a Lutheran clergyman, died when Lichtenberg was only nine years of age. Although none of the children — several of them died at birth or during early infancy — suffered any physical wants, to finance their education must have been a depressive task for the bereaved mother, whose only source of income was a small pension and a few savings.
If only I could express my innermost thoughts in such a manner as they really are — and not disconnected — they certainly would meet with the approval of the world.1
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References
VS., I, p. 22. For a scholarly biography about Lichtenberg, see Otto Deneke: Lichtenbergs Leben, I. München, 1944. The second volume has never been published. Another useful biography is Carl Brinitzer’s: Lichtenberg: Die Geschichte eines gescheiten Mannes (Tübingen, 1956).
Deneke, op. cit., pp. 33-34.
Ibid., p. 60.
VS., VIII, p. 11.
Ibid., VII, p. 172.
Ibid., VIII, p. 43.
Ibid., II, pp. 166-67.
Ibid., VII, p. 252.
Ibid., VIII, p. 163.
Lichtenberg was probably one of the first German professors teaching physics who made regular class demonstrations an integral part of his lectures.
VS., VIII, p. 25.
Ibid., VIII, p. 43.
Ibid., VIII, p. 153.
Ibid., VIII, p. 155.
Ibid., VIII, p. 17.
Ibid., I, p. 62.
Ibid., VIII, p. 72.
Ibid., II, p. 145.
Ibid., VII, p. 325.
Ibid., I, p. 23.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Briefe an die Freunde, selected by W. Spohr, Berlin, 1938, p. 212. This work will henceforth be referred to as B. an die F.
VS., I, p. 28.
Ibid., I, p. 6.
Ibid., I, p. 20.
See Paul Requadt, Lichtenberg: Zum Problem der deutschen Aphoristik (Hameln, 1948), for a work of this kind.
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© 1963 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Øksenholt, S. (1963). Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Biography. In: Thoughts Concerning Education in the Works of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-1065-3_1
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