G.W.F. Hegel
Notes
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), German idealist philosopher. He proposed that reality, history and thought develop through the resolution of contradictions, the process later summarised as thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and that the whole is the unfolding of a single rational "Spirit" coming to know itself. He is among the most influential and least readable philosophers in the canon.
He appears here because Karl Marx took Hegel's dialectic, discarded the Spirit, and made the contradictions material and economic; Communism is Hegel turned, as Marx put it, the right way up. He also stands as the clearest example of the kind of system-building Metaphysics that Karl Popper attacked as unfalsifiable and that the Empiricist principle rules out of court.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel