Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German idealist philosopher, was born at Stuttgart and entered the theological seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. Among his fellow students were Friedrich von Schelling and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. After graduating he became, in 1793, a resident tutor in the home of an aristocratic family at Bern, and in 1796 he took a similar post in Frankfurt. In 1800 he went to Jena, where Schelling had succeeded Johann Gottlieb Fichte as professor of philosophy and was developing an idealist philosophy of nature and metaphysics. Having been accepted as a teacher at Jena on the strength of his dissertation, De Orbitis Planetarum (1801), Hegel collaborated with Schelling in editing the philosophical journal Kritisches Journal der Philosophie and published his first book, Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie (1801). Notable articles by Hegel in the Kritisches...