Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, his life bridging the Enlightenment and the Romantic turn, his thinking marked by the French Revolution and Napoleon's campaigns. He developed absolute idealism to overcome what he saw as the false dualisms plaguing modern philosophy, presenting reality as a unified whole driven by Geist - humankind coming to rational self-knowledge through history. His major works, the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 and the Science of Logic between 1812 and 1816, laid out this vision in exhaustive detail. He reached the peak of his academic career at the University of Berlin, where he held the chair of philosophy until his death in 1831. After he died, his followers fractured: the Right Hegelians preserved orthodoxy, the Left - Feuerbach, Marx - took his dialectic and turned it against religion and the social order. His claim that world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom echoed through existentialism, critical theory, and a century of European thought that couldn't stop arguing with him.