An Introduction to Georg W. F. Hegel

Georg W. F. Hegel

An Introduction

John Knoblock

It is only an inference from the history of the world, that its development has been a rational process; that the history in question has constituted the rational necessary course of the world-spirit -- that spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds this, its one nature, in the phenomena of the world's existence.

From the Philosophy of History

G. W. F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831, was born at Stuttgart on Aug. 27, 1770, the son of a minor government official. He studied at Tübingen, where his classmates included Schelling and the poet Hölderlin. He went to Jena in 1801 as a Privatdozent in philosophy where he collaborated with Schelling in editing the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie. Promoted to a chair in 1805, he then was forced to leave Jena because of the Napoleonic war, while finishing the last pages of his Phenomenology of Mind. In 1816 he became professor of philosophy at Heidelberg. Two years later he succeeded Fichte as a professor in Berlin. Now at the height of his fame and influence, Hegel attracted great numbers of foreign students to Berlin. His success there assured that his views would have an unparalleled impact on German philosophy throughout the 19th century. He was also the major philosophical influence on Marx and Engels, and on English idealistic philosophy. Hegel's metaphysical thought, marked by such vague concepts as "spirit" and "the absolute," is considered extremely obscure which has discouraged many from seriously considering his views. Recent Anglo-American philosophers have generally ignored Hegel, accepting Bertrand Russell's contention that Hegel's entire system rests on a few elementary logical errors. But in Europe his many works have attracted the attention of such major philosophical figures in contemporary Continental philosophy as Theodor Adorno, Hans Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Kojève, Georg Lukás, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ernst Bloch.

Major Published Works