Peter Singer discusses the thought of Hegel and Marx in this episode of the 1987 series on the Great Philosophers with Bryan Magee. Hegel was an important and influential 19th century German philosopher, best known for his dialectic, absolute idealism, and historicism, among various other things. The Hegelian dialectic is the process in which everything changes, based on the triad: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Hegel's idealism rejected the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself and instead embraced a monistic vision of the world in which everything forms an organic, interconnected, rational whole. Nothing is true or real except the whole. Not only a thinker of totality, Hegel was a historicist thinker who rejected the notion that ideas are static and fixed (e.g. the concepts of human nature and morality, as well as the concept of reason itself). Things can only be understood by understanding their historical context, which, for Hegel, is a process which changes and develops, having an underlying meaning or significance. So not only is there history in reason, but there is reason in history. For Hegel, history progresses towards its endpoint of ever greater freedom, driven by constant conflict and struggle for such freedom via the dialectical process. Like Hegel, Marx also was an influential German thinker. As a young or left Hegelian, he adopted much of Hegel's system, but substituted a kind of materialism for Hegel's idealism. This meant that rather than ideas underlying everything and driving historical change, it was the material and economic conditions which determine one's ideas, culture, and historical development. (My Description)

The full series:    • The Great Philosophers with Bryan Mag...  

00:00 Introduction
03:15 Philosophy of History
05:17 Dialectical Process
09:20 Geist
14:03 Alienation
16:11 Goal of the Dialectic
18:03 Self-Knowledge & Freedom
20:10 Society & Freedom
26:14 Hegel's Logic
27:51 His Central Concept
29:26 Hegel's Obscurity & Influence
31:58 Left vs Right Hegelians
33:57 Marx vs Hegel
36:31 Contributions
39:44 Totalitarianism

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