This is Philosophy Bytes with me David Edmonds.

And me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophybytes is available at www.

www.philosophybytes.com.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

is often said to have believed that history is determined,

that its inevitable course was laid out from the start.

But Richard Burke, Professor of the History of Political Thought at Cambridge,

says this is a misconception about Hegel's view of history.

And it's not the only one.

Richard Burke, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

The topic we're going to look at today is

Hegel's philosophy of history. Now obviously that's a big subject and Hegel is not an easy

thinker to get a handle on. Could you begin by just saying a little bit about who Hegel was before we

get onto his philosophy of history? Yes, well you write it's a very large topic, but to say something generally about

Hegel, Hegel is born in Wurttemberg in 1770 and he died in Prussia in 1831.

Two really dominant events in his life, A, the fact that he was 19 at the outbreak of the French

Revolution and its complicated course dominated much of his life, that's number one. But number

two, he was a late contemporary of Emmanuel Kant's and Kant's own philosophical project was itself regarded by him, thus as Haygel and his contemporaries,

as itself a massive revolutionary event. And I think these two historical happenings, Kant and the French

Revolution, cast, if you'd like a shadow over his career. That's how I'd frame, I think, Hegel Germany.

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