G. W. F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and studied theology at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, where he shared rooms with the poet Hölderlin and with Schelling. After years as a private tutor in Bern and Frankfurt, he joined Schelling at the University of Jena in 1801, and edited a philosophical journal with him.

His Phenomenology of Spirit, finished in 1806 as Napoleon’s army fought at Jena, traces the path of consciousness from sense-certainty to absolute knowing. Its preface marked his break with Schelling. He then worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg and as head of a school in Nuremberg, where he wrote his Science of Logic, before professorships at Heidelberg and, from 1818, Berlin.

In Berlin he became the most influential philosopher in Germany. His lectures on the philosophy of history, of religion, of art and on the history of philosophy, published after his death from his and his students’ notes, ranged over the whole of human culture, including the religions of India and China. He died in Berlin in 1831, during a cholera epidemic.