Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

German philosopher who conceived of mind and nature as two abstractions of one indivisible whole, Spirit. His system, which is a type of idealism, traces the emergence of Spirit in the logical study of concepts and the process of world history.

For Hegel, concepts unfold, and in unfolding they generate the reality that is described by them. To understand reality is to understand our concepts, and vice versa. The development of a concept involves three stages, which he calls dialectic. The dialectic moves from the thesis, or indeterminate concept (for example, a thing in space), to the antithesis, or determinate concept (for example, an animal), and then to the synthesis (for example, a cat), which is the resolution of what Hegel thinks is the contradiction between the indeterminate and determinate concepts. As logic, Hegel's dialectic is worthless. As an account of how intellectual and social development occurs, it is shrewd.

Hegel's works include The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and Philosophy of Right (1821).