Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1770–1831 2 entries
Biography
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and the most influential thinker of German idealism. Born in Stuttgart in 1770, he studied theology at the seminary in Tübingen, where he shared a room with the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher Schelling. After years as a private tutor in Bern and Frankfurt, he taught at the University of Jena, where in 1806 he completed the Phenomenology of Spirit while Napoleon’s army fought at the gates of the city.
When the war left him without a post, he edited a newspaper in Bamberg and then ran a gymnasium in Nuremberg, where he wrote the Science of Logic. In 1816 he became a professor in Heidelberg and in 1818 in Berlin, where his lectures and his Elements of the Philosophy of Right made him the leading philosopher of Germany. He taught that thought, reality and history develop through contradictions that are overcome at a higher level, toward ever greater freedom of the spirit, an idea that deeply influenced Marx. He died in Berlin in 1831, during a cholera epidemic.
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