4 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
German philosopher — who created the dialectical method, absolute idealism, and the philosophy of history — whose Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic, and Philosophy of Right are the most ambitious systematic philosophical works since Aristotle.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German idealist philosopher who radicalized Kant's critical philosophy into a dynamic theory of the self as pure activity.
Hegel's 1807 philosophical masterwork tracing the development of consciousness from immediate sense-certainty through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowing — written in Jena while Napoleon fought outside the city.
Hegel's 1820 treatise on right, morality, ethical life, and the state — arguing that freedom is realized through rational institutions (family, civil society, state) and that the state is the highest embodiment of ethical life — including the famous preface line 'The real is the rational and the rational is the real.'