Hegel & Marx - Bryan Magee & Peter Singer (1987)

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