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...