Pack Thinkers
Portrait of Georg W. F. Hegel

Long 19th c. · 1770–1831

Who influenced Georg W. F. Hegel?

Influences and legacy

History as the unfolding of Spirit through contradiction — dialectics before Marx made them material.

Georg W. F. Hegel was influenced by Heraclitus, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder and F. W. J. Schelling, and went on to influence Ludwig Feuerbach, Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Theodor W. Adorno and 10 others. That is 21 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.

Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Jakob Schlesinger, Public domain See the whole map

Who was Georg W. F. Hegel?

Born in Stuttgart, Hegel lived through the shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism and read the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars philosophically. His career culminated in the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. He built a system, often called absolute idealism, that treats reality as a unified whole, with spirit (Geist) as humankind coming to know itself through history.

His dialectical method tests ideas by their own standards, exposes their contradictions and resolves them in a higher unity that both cancels and preserves what came before. His major works are the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Science of Logic. He held that world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom. After his death his followers split into Right and Left Hegelians, and the Left, including Feuerbach and Marx, turned his method to materialism.

Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.

Who influenced Georg W. F. Hegel?

5 direct influences on this map, earliest first.

Who did Georg W. F. Hegel influence?

16 thinkers on this map draw directly on Georg W. F. Hegel.

The line of teachers behind Georg W. F. Hegel

The longest documented line of influence ending at Georg W. F. Hegel runs 22 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.

  1. Thales of Miletus
  2. Anaximenes of Miletus
  3. Anaxagoras
  4. Socrates
  5. Antisthenes
  6. Diogenes of Sinope
  7. Crates of Thebes
  8. Zeno of Citium
  9. Seneca
  10. Tertullian
  11. Augustine of Hippo
  12. Anselm of Canterbury
  13. Peter Lombard
  14. Thomas Aquinas
  15. René Descartes
  16. Thomas Hobbes
  17. Baruch Spinoza
  18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  19. Christian Wolff
  20. Immanuel Kant
  21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  22. F. W. J. Schelling
  23. Georg W. F. Hegel

Two steps away from Georg W. F. Hegel

Indirect influences

The second generation

Contemporaries of Georg W. F. Hegel

Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Georg W. F. Hegel, with no direct line between them.

Georg W. F. Hegel by the numbers

Direct influences
5
Direct followers
16 — #1 of 279 on this map
Thinkers upstream
88
Thinkers downstream
67
Wikipedia languages
140 — #6 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
Card rarity
Legendary

Schools and lineages

Questions about Georg W. F. Hegel

Who influenced Georg W. F. Hegel?
Heraclitus, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder and F. W. J. Schelling.
Who did Georg W. F. Hegel influence?
Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Alexander Herzen, Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kitarō Nishida, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Jacques Lacan, Alexandre Kojève and Theodor W. Adorno.
When did Georg W. F. Hegel live?
1770–1831. The map files Georg W. F. Hegel under the long 19th century.
How rare is the Georg W. F. Hegel card?
Wikipedia carries an article on Georg W. F. Hegel in 140 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.

More 19th-century philosophers

All 279 thinkers