G.W.F. Hegel

\Who Was Hegel?

from philosophybasics.com

G.W.F. Hegel is believed to have said on seeing the all-conquering Napolean Bonaparte in his (Hegel’s) native Germany in the first decade of the 19th century: “There goes the world spirit on horseback.”Considered by many philosophy professors to be a bookend to Plato, Georg  Wilhelm Friederich Hegel is widely regarded as an intellectual giant, A contemporary of Ludwig Van Beethoven and Napolean Bonaparte, the age in which he lived is seen by some to be the birthday – at least in many respects – of the world of today. His Weltanschauung (world view) is ofteen seen as one that borders on the occult, Hegel’s  philosophy has affected not only our minds but our everyday affairs in this modern age, insofar as it is regarded as the foundation (or at least in part) of Marxism and the bloody events that characterized the eruption of this political movement in the last few centuries.

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (often known as G. W. F. Hegel or Georg Hegel) (1770 – 1831) was a German philosopher of the early Modern period. He was a leading figure in the German Idealism movement in the early 19th Century, although his ideas went far beyond earlier Kantianism, and he founded his own school of Hegelianism.

He has been called the “Aristotle of modern times”, and he used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion. Despite charges of obscurantism and “pseudo-philosophy”, Hegel is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German thought.

His influence has been immense, both within philosophy and in the other sciences, and he came to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools (whether they supported or opposed his ideas), not the least of which was the Marxism of Karl Marx which was to have so profound an effect on the political landscape of the 20th Century…

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