Philosophy

Schopenhauer was an enthusiastic reader of Immanuel Kant, and it seems likely that his ideas about phenomena and noumena influenced him. In his book The World As Will And Representation in 1818, he takes the idea a step further by arguing that there are not two...

Schopenhauer, like many others before him, believed that the world is experienced from the perspective of the mind, as representation. He believed that the noumenal reality (the universe of pure experience) is characterized by will, and as such is one...

Hegel proposed a synthesis of many different philosophies — particularly those of Kant and Fichte — and developed his own version of idealism. He claimed that nothing is real except what we perceive, and therefore we must begin by analyzing our perceptions to...

Although Hegel’s thought is perhaps best known today through his emphasis on the dialectical relationship between thesis and antithesis, it is the view of Hegelianism that the struggle between them produces the truth of the whole. Each side contains elements of the...

In his famous book On History, Hegel claims that history is "a process wherein spirit evolves". In other words, in each period of time, the Spirit of that period is different – the Zeitgeist. Each period contains its own particular ideas, beliefs, and ways of...

Ludwig Feuerbach – despite being inspired by Hegel’s works – developed a philosophical system that was almost his polar opposite. He believed that all objects and phenomena were made up of physical elements and that the mind was just another object, made up of those...

As a student, Karl Marx was keen on studying Hegel’s philosophy. He found Hegel’s idea of history as a journey through stages and conflicts compelling. However, unlike other Marxists, he believed that this journey was not just political and economic. Like other...

Karl Marx was a communist, and his writings influenced many in the movement. He believed the proletariat should be educated and organized and that society should be run democratically. But at first, Marx wanted to focus on economic issues, not politics. His early...

Kant had shown that we cannot prove whether God exists or not. He argued that if we were to try to show that God does exist, then we would be doing exactly what he said we shouldn't do – trying to prove something that you might not even be sure about yourself....

Marx combined his economic analysis of the existing capitalist system with a dialectic view of history. He believed that capitalism had undergone a series of cycles of boom and bust, each time ending in a crisis that could not be resolved within the existing system....