Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1770-1831
German philosopher

Hegel was born in Stuttgart, the last and perhaps the most important of the great German idealist philosophers in the line from Kant, Fichte and Schelling. He studied theology at T�bingen, and taught at Berne (1793), Frankfurt am Main (1796) and Jena (1801), but his academic career was interrupted in 1806 by the closure of the university after Napoleon I's victory at Jena. When headmaster of the gymnasium at Nuremberg (1808-16), he published in 1807 his first great work Ph�nomenologie des Geistes ('The Phenomenology of Mind'), which describes how the human mind has progressed from mere consciousness through self-consciousness, reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowledge.

This work was followed by Wissenschaft der Logik (2 vols, 1812 and 1816, 'Science of Logic'), in which he set out his famous dialectic, a triadic process whereby thesis generates antithesis and both are superseded by a higher synthesis which incorporates what is rational in them and rejects the irrational. His work gained him the chair at Heidelberg in 1816, and he now resumed his university career and produced in 1817 a compendium of his entire system entitled Encyclop�die der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse ('Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Comprising Logic, Philosophy of Nature and of Mind').

In 1818 he succeeded Fichte as professor in Berlin and remained there until his death from cholera in 1831. His later works include the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821, 'The Philosophy of Right'), which contains his political philosophy, and his important lectures on the history of philosophy, art and the philosophy of history. Hegel was a system-builder of the most ambitious and thorough kind, and though his philosophy is difficult and obscure it has been a great influence on later philosophies, including Marxism, Positivism, and Existentialism.

Bibliography: R C Solomon, From Hegel to Existentialism (1987); Peter Singer, Hegel (1983); Raymond Plant, Hegel (1973); Walter A Kaufmann, Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts and Commentary (1965).