Hegel and Aristotle

Paper Summary:

In this paper, the writer draws comparisons between the philosophies of Aristotle and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an 18th century German philosopher. The paper describes these men as seeing the process of human thought as linked to history and politics. Additionally, the paper explains that Aristotle and Hegel viewed human thought itself as a process which involved a system of logic. The author argues that Aristotle's beliefs perhaps laid the groundwork for the much later ideas of Hegel, and the influence of both men's philosophies on thought, logic, and politics influenced people and schools of thought for years after their deaths.

From the Paper:

"Aristotle believed in the power of experience and the observation of the world around us. His work in the field of logic outlasted his time period and he even named the field of study. Aristotle "systematized logic, working out which forms of inference were valid and which invalid--in other words, what really does follow from what, and what only appears to but doesn't really; and he gave all these different forms of inference names. For two thousand years the study of logic was to mean the study of Aristotle's logic" (Magee 34). This concept of a logical study of the world was taken up by Hegel in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Aristotle, he believed in a logical progression of change and development toward reality and self-awareness. "He saw everything as having developed. Everything that exists is the outcome of a process; and therefore, he thought, understanding in any broad area of reality always involves understanding a process of change" (Magee 159). Hegel was known to be among the most systematic of the philosophers in the period of "German idealism" and "attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a 'logical' starting point" (Redding 1)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Magee, Bryan. The Story of Philosophy. London: Dorling Kindersley, 2001.
• Magill, Frank, ed. Masterpieces of World Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
• Redding, Paul, "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2006/entries/hegel/.

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