(1770-1831) German philosopher. He first studied at the high school in his hometown, and between 1788 and 1793 he pursued theological studies in Tübingen, where he was a classmate of the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher Schelling. Thanks to Schelling, he joined the faculty of the University of Jena in 1801, which was closed upon Napoleon's entry into the city (1806).

While immersing himself in the works of thinkers such as Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant, Hegel shared his classmates' enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Although initially very close to the idealism of Fichte and Schelling, as he developed his own philosophical system, first as a professor at the University of Heidelberg (1816-1818) and then in Berlin (1818-1831), he gradually distanced himself from them.

Considered by classical philosophical history as the representative of "the pinnacle of the nineteenth-century German movement of philosophical idealism" and as a revolutionary of dialectics, he would have a profound impact on the historical materialism of Karl Marx.