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Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Philosopher of the month: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [timeline] | OUPblog

"This July, the OUP Philosophy team honors Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) as their Philosopher of the Month notes Catherine Pugh, Marketing Assistant at Oxford University Press in Oxford, England and John Priest, Marketing Assistant at Oxford University Press in New York.  

Portrait by Jakob Schlesinger dated 1831, the
year of Hegel's death.

Photo: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Although Hegel was a hugely successful philosopher in his own right–described as “the most famous modern philosopher” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe–his legacy remains the influence he had on later philosophers. A huge proportion of critical theory philosophers acknowledge his influence, with most major positions from the last 150 years having been developed in response to Hegelian thought, including Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, and many more. 

Born in Stuttgart, Hegel studied theology and philosophy at the theological seminary in Tübingen where he became close friends with Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854). Schelling did not have the lasting impact of Hegel, but during Hegel’s early years Schelling was a much larger name in the discipline. Not only did Hegel’s early work The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy (1801) discuss his friend’s ideas, but so too did the preface of Hegel’s first major publication, the monumental henomenology of Spirit (1807). This work follows the historical and logical process of the mind reaching its final goal of being free and fully self-conscious. It has been described as one of the most influential philosophical works ever written, and famously includes the master and slave example of freedom and self-consciousness which Karl Marx used when relating capitalists to workers. Marx also took inspiration from Hegel’s Science of Logic volumes (1812-1816) for his theory of dialectical materialism.

Source: OUPblog (blog)