G.W.F. Hegel

1770-1831 · German · Metaphysics, Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion

What experience and history teach us is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history.

Born in Stuttgart in 1770, Hegel came of age alongside the French Revolution and never stopped thinking about it. He studied theology at Tübingen alongside Schelling and Hölderlin, then arrived in Jena just as Napoleon was remaking Europe — famously glimpsing the emperor before the battle and calling him "the world soul on horseback." After years of upheaval he secured the Berlin chair in 1818 and became the dominant philosopher of the German university world until his death in 1831.

Topics G.W.F. Hegel addresses

• Geist (Spirit)
• the Absolute
• Aufhebung (sublation)
• the dialectical method
• the master-slave dialectic
• recognition (Anerkennung)
• the unhappy consciousness
• Sittlichkeit (ethical life)
• civil society
• the state
• the cunning of reason
• world-historical individuals
• the speculative proposition
• the identity of the rational and the actual
• absolute knowing
• the science of logic
• the categories
• Being, Essence, and Concept
• the Idea
• objective spirit
• subjective spirit
• absolute spirit
• the philosophy of nature
• the philosophy of right

Converse with G.W.F. Hegel on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in G.W.F. Hegel's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.