Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [addendum] | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [addendum]

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel changed his major philosophical views very little from the publication of his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1807 until his death in 1831. This stability and continuity have not made it any easier for commentators to agree on what those views were. Disagreement about Hegel's basic position and its implications is still widespread, even more so after a great resurgence of Hegel studies after World War II.

In the Anglophone philosophical world, Hegel's position is still often summarized as an objective idealism, thanks largely to his influence on early twentieth-century British objective idealists such as Francis Herbert Bradley. He is said to have believed that only "mind" (the preferred translation of Geist until the A. V. Miller translation of Phenomenology of Spirit was first published in 1977) was "real"; or that no determinate individual object could be said to be real. Such an object was really a "moment" of the interrelated and temporally developing structure of the one true substance, the absolute, or absolute mind. Such a substance was said to develop over time; the nature of that development was a process of greater self-consciousness, and this development was reflected in, or the underlying basis of, the great social and political changes of world history, as well as intellectual changes in philosophy, art, and religion.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [addendum] article

Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 2,480 words (approx. 8 pages at 300 words per page).