George Wilhelm Friederich Hegel was born in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied theology at Tubingen, and in 1801 edited with the philosopher Schelling the 'Critical Journal of Philosophy', in which he outlined his system with its emphasis on reason rather than the Romantic intution of Schelling, which he attacked in his first major work
'The Phenomenology of the Mind'.

He then published his 'Science of Logic' and the 'Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences' in which he explained his threesome system of logic, philosophy of nature, and mind. He became professor in Heidelberg (1816) and Berlin (1818).

Hegel's 'Idealistic philosophy' explained the world as the expression of a higher spiritual reality which develops in a dialectical process that swings from thesis to antithesis and back again towards a higher synthesis.