Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel and Hegelianism Forerunners Aristotle Böhme Rousseau Kant Goethe Fichte Hölderlin Schelling Successors Feuerbach Marx Lukács Merleau-Ponty Adorno Gadamer Derrida Principal works The Phenomenology of Spirit Science of Logic Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences Lectures on Aesthetics Elements of the Philosophy of Right Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Lectures on the Philosophy of History Lectures on the History of Philosophy Schools Absolute idealism Hegelianism (dialectics) British idealism German idealism Related topics Right Hegelians Young Hegelians v t e Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (/ˈheɪɡəl/; German: [ˈɡeɔɐ k ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡəl]; August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher who was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and served as an important precursor to Continental philosophy, Marxism and historism. Hegel's principal achievement was his development of absolute idealism as a means to integrate the notions of mind, nature, subject, object, psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed the notion of the master–slave dialectic and the concept of Geist ("mind-spirit") as the expression of the integration ("sublation", Aufheben), without elimination or reduction, of otherwise seemingly contradictory or opposing ideas. Examples include relationships between nature and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. He also made original and influential contributions to speculative logic, the role of history and the notions of the negative and the ethical. Hegel influenced many thinkers and writers whose own positions varied widely. Karl Barth described Hegel as a "Protestant Aquinas", while Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "All the great philosophical ideas of the past century – the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis – had their beginnings in Hegel". Michel Foucault has contended that contemporary philosophers may be "doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road travel".