Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. He received his education at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he was friends with the future philosophers Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin. He became fascinated by the works of Spinoza, Kant, and Rousseau, and by the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality -- consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society -- leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts of a larger, evolutionary whole. This whole is mental because it is mind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is the order of rational thought. It is not a thing or being that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself.

Major works

• Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes Sometimes translated as Phenomenology of Mind) 1807 (See battle of Jena)
• Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) 1812-1816 (last edition of the first part 1831)
• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften) 1817-1830
• Divided into three Major Sections:
• The Logic
• Philosophy of Nature
• Philosophy of Mind
• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) 1821
• Lectures on Aesthetics
• Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
• Lectures on the History of Philosophy
• Lectures on Philosophy of Religion