Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Historicism, Hegelianism, Young Hegelians, Absolute Idealism

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Historicism, Hegelianism, Young Hegelians, Absolute Idealism, Master-Slave Dialectic, Aufheben, Right Hegelians, Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, David Kolb, the Owl of Minerva, Ahistoricism, Glaucus, Diamond Net, Chemism, Sittlichkeit. Excerpt: Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy attributed to G. W. F. Hegel . It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole. Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all, there must be in some sense an identity of thought and being. Otherwise, the subject would never have access to the object and we would have no certainty about any of our knowledge of the world. To account for the differences between thought and being, however, as well as the richness and diversity of each, the unity of thought and being cannot be expressed as the abstract identity "A=A" . Absolute idealism is the attempt to demonstrate this unity using a new "speculative" philosophical method, which requires new concepts and rules of logic. According to Hegel, the absolute ground of being is essentially a dynamic, historical process of necessity that unfolds by itself in the form of increasingly complex forms of being and of consciousness, ultimately giving rise to all the diversity in the world and in the concepts with which we think and make sense of the world.The absolute idealist position was dominant in the nineteenth century in Germany, Britain, and, much less so, the United States, giving rise to movements known as German idealism, British idealism, and the objective idealism of Josiah Royce . The absolute idealist position should be distinguished from the subjective idealism of Berkeley ...