Hegel and his Heirs

Robert Harrison and Adrian Daub discuss Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his heirs a few years back in an episode of Entitled Opinions, a KZSU Stanford University program. http://french-italian.stanford.edu/op...

Hegel was one of the most important and influential 19th century German philosophers, best known for his dialectic, absolute idealism, and historicism, among various other things. The Hegelian dialectic is the process in which everything changes, based on the triad: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Hegel's idealism rejected the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself and instead embraced a monistic vision of the world in which everything forms an organic, interconnected, rational whole. Nothing is true or real except the whole. Not only a thinker of totality, Hegel was a historicist thinker who rejected the notion that ideas are static and fixed (e.g. the concepts of human nature and morality, as well as the concept of reason itself). Things can only be understood by understanding their historical context, which, for Hegel, is a process which changes and develops, and which has an underlying meaning or significance. So not only is there history in reason, but there is reason in history. For Hegel, history progresses towards its endpoint of ever greater freedom, driven by alienation, that of constant conflict and struggle by way of this dialectical process. (My Description)

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