Continental Philosophy EssayEssay Preview: Continental Philosophy EssayReport this essayGeorg W.F. Hegel was a German philosopher who with two other philosophers created German idealism. He influenced writers of widely varying positions, including his admirers and detractors where he discussed a relation between nature and freedom, immanence and transcendence, and the unification of these dualities without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. He is also the founder of Hegelianism where philosophy is defined as all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories according to his favorite motto, “the rational alone is real”. According to Hegel, his method in philosophy consisted of following out the triadic development in each concept and in each thing. Therefore, hoping that philosophy would not contradict experience but will give to the data of experience; the philosophical which is, the ultimately true explanation.
Derek S. Taylor
Hegel, M.D. – A History of Philosophical Education (New York Metropolitan University Press, 1988) «Hegel, M.D. «The great philosopher of the twentieth century. My friend. My name is Derek and I am the editor of a collection of essays by Hegel and his sons and is always interested in philosophical issues and controversies. Derek also has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Iowa. He is the author of six books, two articles on The Structure of Reason, one on logic and cognitive processes. Hegel attended University of Arizona and a Master’s of Philosophy in law from the University of California. He was a fellow at the Theoretical Society of California and was the president of the National Association of Philosophy Research. After leaving the University of Arizona, Hegel moved to Boston and became a physician. Hegel’s wife, Marian M. Brach, is a philosophy professor at Massachusetts University. Derek also worked for a medical school and was a faculty member of the American Philosophical Association until 1986, when he retired from the profession in 1989 (with the help of an international consortium of philosophy teachers and a fulltime role as Professor of American Philosophy at Boston University).[/p>
«Dr. Brian K. Gellman is a graduate of Harvard University where he was chief of faculty and principal of the philosophy department. He spent nine years as assistant professor at Harvard University’s philosophy program including the postdoctoral work that followed. He continued philosophy at Harvard for four years then returned to Harvard University seeking co-founder duties of philosophy, an invitation to be deputy chairman of the department. He is the author of many books, including The Philosophy of Logic: An Essay on Philosophy, by G.J. Eerdmans.
»Philip B. Ayn Rand, Ph.D.
Brief Thoughts on Hegel, Philosophy, and Theology
Hegel, Michael W. (2002) «The great philosopher of all of modern philosophy. A master of philosophical thought. With an eye for the details of every word on which his work is based. I am no philosopher by any means, but a practical theorist of the human intellect. I have been a disciple of Hegel for 18 months. He is an ardent believer in the possibility of the absolute as opposed to the negation of things (see The Philosophy of Logic as a Critique and the Great Mind). For nearly his entire lifetime he has held that the essence consists in an understanding of the cosmos and the infinite. In the great scheme of things, he seems to offer an account of the world that is coherent and unified, but to be incomplete. But his work, he says, is not wholly consistent with human reason. It is not what is most compelling and the greatest moral idea, or even the most philosophical, but an interpretation of itself. It is both a source of pleasure and a source of inspiration, but it is not what can be justified by reason. Hence on the other hand with the human mind this philosophy is as good as it can be—not even more, for the ultimate ends, because the ultimate goal is not merely to reach them, but to express what seems to be true in thought, which is the true essence. The main aim of the Human Mind is not to achieve the highest possible goal through experience alone, but to create an overall sense of the world, to think clearly, to understand things according to their truth—but to do it in real thought. In this view the human mind can be understood as a kind of mind-work, which is an elaboration on the human body. However, what it actually does is to present things as clearly and as vividly as possible—to express their contentions and to
Hegel categorized his philosophies into four different groups, consisting of Philosophy of nature, the Philosophy of mind, the Philosophy of history and the Philosophy of absolute mind. Then we get into Continental philosophy where contemporary usage refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. The term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the late 20th century, who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions that had been largely ignored or neglected by the analytic movement. In general characteristics, it is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements. The term “continental philosophy,” was first widely used by English-speaking philosophers to describe university courses in the 1970s, emerging as a collective name for the philosophies then widespread in France and Germany, such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. The term (its actual definition) can be found going back as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill’s 1840 essay entitled Coleridge where he contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of “Continental philosophy” and “Continental philosophers” with the English empiricism of Bentham and the 18th century generally. Meanwhile in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, Brentano, Husserl, and Reinach were developing a new philosophical method of their own, phenomenology. Heidegger took this phenomenological approach in new directions, and, after WWII, French philosophers led by Jean Paul Sartre developed Heideggers ideas into a movement known as existentialism.
We now get into existentialism where philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them. Existentialism tends to focus on the question of human existence —