This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

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Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

The late 18th early 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has had an enormous influence on Western thought.

Carl Marx, for example, was heavily indebted to him.

But his prose is notoriously complex and he's not someone to open with in philosophy 101. That would be like learning to read with

Ulysses or starting an instrument with Rachmaninoff. It takes a brilliantly lucid mind to

decode him and so philosophy bites turn to Professor

Robert Stern, who's based at the University of Sheffield.

We ask Professor Stern to explain the one idea in Hegel that even most non-Hagalians have heard of, thesis, antithesis, or Hegel's

dialectic.

Robert Stern, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much.

The topic we're going to focus on today is Hegel's dialectic.

I don't know much about Hegel, but I know the caricature, as it were, of the dialectic

is that you have a thesis.

Somebody puts forward a thesis, it's an antithesis, a contradiction of it, and somehow miraculously from the clash of these two things a synthesis emerges. Is that about right?

Yes, I mean it is a bit of a cliche,

which you say, and in fact, as far as I know,

Hegel never used those terms, thesis, synthesis.

But on the other hand, there is certainly a large element of truth to the basic story.

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