Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and the most influential systematic thinker of the German Idealist tradition. His Phenomenology of Spirit traces the development of consciousness through stages culminating in absolute knowledge, while the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences set out a comprehensive metaphysical and historical system. His Philosophy of Right addressed ethics, politics, and law, and shaped modern political theory through both right and left Hegelian successors, most notably Marx. Hegel's dialectical method, often caricatured as thesis-antithesis-synthesis, structures his treatment of nearly every philosophical problem. His influence on subsequent continental philosophy, including existentialism, Marxism, and critical theory, has been profound.