Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.
Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and theologian. As a student of G. W. F. Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and, beginning with Hegel's analysis of Christianity's Hellenic as well as Jewish roots, concluded that early Christianity owed more to ancient Greek philosophy (Stoicism) than to Judaism.
German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right is a work by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel published in 1820, though the book's original title page dates it to 1821. Hegel's most mature statement of his legal, moral, social and political philosophy, it is an expansion upon concepts only briefly dealt with in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, published in 1817. Law provides for Hegel the cornerstone of the modern state. As such, he criticized Karl Ludwig von Haller's The Restoration of the Science of the State, in which the latter claimed that law was superficial, because natural law and the "right of the most powerful" was sufficient. The absence of law characterized for Hegel despotism, whether absolutist or ochlocracist.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his one-time university roommate, early friend, and later rival. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is regarded as difficult because of its evolving nature.
Johann Eduard Erdmann was a German religious pastor, historian of philosophy, and philosopher of religion, of which he wrote on the mediation of faith and knowledge. He was known to be a follower of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he studied under August Carlblom (1797-1877), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he regarded as his mentor. Erdmann also studied the works of Karl Daub. Historians of philosophy usually include Erdmann as a member of the Right Wing of the Hegelian movement, a group of thinkers who were also referred to variously as the Right Hegelians (Rechtshegelianer), the Hegelian Right, and/or as the Old Hegelians (Althegelianer).
The Tübinger Stift is a hall of residence and teaching; it is owned and supported by the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg, and located in the university city of Tübingen, in South West Germany. The Stift was founded as an Augustinian monastery in the Middle Ages. After the Reformation, in 1536, Duke Ulrich turned the Stift into a seminary which served to prepare Protestant pastors for Württemberg. To this day the scholarship is still given to students in preparation for the ministry or teaching in Baden-Württemberg. Students receive a scholarship which consists of boarding, lodging and further academic support.
Karl Christian Friedrich Krause was a German philosopher whose doctrines became known as Krausism. Krausism, when considered in its totality as a complete, stand-alone philosophical system, had only a small following in Germany, France, and Belgium, in contradistinction to certain other philosophical systems that had a much larger following in Europe at that time. However, Krausism became very popular and influential in Restoration Spain not as a complete, comprehensive philosophical system per se, but as a broad cultural movement. In Spain, Krausism was known as "Krausismo", and Krausists were known as "Krausistas". Outside of Spain, the Spanish Krausist cultural movement was referred to as Spanish Krausism.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is the most widely-discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an "exposition of the coming to be of knowledge". This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of "the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge".
In late modern continental philosophy, neo-Kantianism was a revival of the 18th-century philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The neo-Kantians sought to develop and clarify Kant's theories, particularly his concept of the thing-in-itself and his moral philosophy.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, also translated as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, is a major work by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), originally given as lectures at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828, and 1830. It presents world history in terms of the Hegelian philosophy in order to show that history follows the dictates of reason and that the natural progress of history is due to the outworking of absolute spirit.
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a manuscript written by the German political philosopher Karl Marx in 1843 but unpublished during his lifetime—except for the introduction, published in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. In the manuscript, Marx comments on excerpts of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's 1820 book Elements of the Philosophy of Right that deal with 'civil society' and the state paragraph by paragraph. One of Marx's major criticisms of Hegel in the document is the fact that many of his dialectical arguments begin in abstraction.
Lectures on the History of Philosophy delivered by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1805-6, 1816-8, 1819, 1820, 1825–6, 1827–8, 1829–30, and 1831, just before he died in November of that year.
Lectures on Aesthetics is a compilation of notes from university lectures on aesthetics given by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Heidelberg in 1818 and in Berlin in 1820/21, 1823, 1826 and 1828/29. It was compiled in 1835 by his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho, using Hegel's own hand-written notes and notes his students took during the lectures, but Hotho's work may render some of Hegel's thought more systematic than Hegel's initial presentation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion outlines his ideas on Christianity as a form of self-consciousness. They represent the final and in some ways the decisive element of his philosophical system. In light of his distinctive philosophical approach, using a method that is dialectical and historical, Hegel offers a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of Christianity and its characteristic doctrines. The approach taken in these lectures is to some extent prefigured in Hegel's first published book, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).
Douglas Moggach is a professor at the University of Ottawa and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and has held visiting appointments at Sidney Sussex College and King's College, Cambridge, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa., and the Fondazione San Carlo di Modena,where he taught a graduate seminar in Italian on German Idealism. Moggach has also held the University Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, he won the Killam Research Fellowship awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts. He was named Distinguished University Professor at University of Ottawa in 2011.
The following is a list of the major events in the history of German idealism, along with related historical events.
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians (Linkshegelianer), or the Hegelian Left, were a group of German intellectuals who, in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1831, reacted to and wrote about his ambiguous legacy. The Young Hegelians drew on his idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restricting freedom and reason; and they proceeded to mount radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system. They rejected anti-utopian aspects of his thought that "Old Hegelians" have interpreted to mean that the world has already essentially reached perfection.
