Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher whose system of Absolute Idealism constitutes one of the most ambitious and influential — and most disputed — philosophical projects in the Western tradition. His dialectical method — the movement of thought through contradiction toward ever greater comprehensiveness — was developed across the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right. For Hegel, reality is not static but historical: the Absolute gradually comes to know itself through the unfolding of human history and culture.

Hegel's influence has been vast and paradoxical. Marx inverted his idealism into a materialist account of history; Kierkegaard rejected his systematic rationalism in favour of the individual's inward confrontation with existence; and the existentialists, phenomenologists, and analytic philosophers all defined themselves in relation to him.