Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) is a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism.

His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionizes European philosophy and is an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.

Hegel develops a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy.

In particular, he develops the concept that mind or spirit manifests itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrates and unites, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other.

Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.

Hegel influences writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, T. H. Green, Marx, Engels, Vygotsky, F. H. Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Croce, Küng, Kojève, Fukuyama, Žižek, Brandom, Iqbal) and his detractors (Schopenhauer, Herbart, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Peirce, Popper, Russell, Heidegger).

His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life" and the importance of history.