Absolute idealism

Absolute idealism is a metaphysical view in which reality forms a unified, intelligible whole that philosophy can comprehend. It treats the whole, rather than isolated objects, as fundamental.

Idealism: A family of philosophical views that gives mind, ideas, or experience a fundamental role in reality. Absolute idealism is a comprehensive form of idealism, extending its account of mind and reality to the whole.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: A German philosopher whose system presents reality and thought as developing toward an integrated rational whole. Hegel gave absolute idealism its most influential systematic formulation.
Realism: The view that reality exists independently of how it is perceived or conceived. Realism disputes the idealist emphasis on reality’s relation to thought.
British idealism: A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British philosophical movement influenced by Hegel and other idealists. Absolute idealism supplied the movement’s central metaphysical framework.
Monism: The metaphysical view that reality is ultimately one, rather than composed of fundamentally independent kinds of substance. Its unified reality gives absolute idealism a monistic structure.
F. H. Bradley: A British idealist philosopher whose work argues that reality is an interconnected whole beyond ordinary relations and appearances. Bradley became the leading British advocate of absolute idealism in the late nineteenth century.
Pluralism: The metaphysical view that reality contains multiple fundamentally distinct entities or kinds. Pluralism opposes the claim that reality forms one ultimately unified whole.
Analytic philosophy: A philosophical tradition emphasizing logical analysis, conceptual clarity, and argument. Early analytic philosophers defined part of their project through opposition to British idealism.
Hegelian dialectic: A method of philosophical development in which concepts are transformed through tensions and their resolution in more comprehensive accounts. Hegel uses dialectical development to explain how thought can comprehend an increasingly inclusive whole.
Josiah Royce: An American idealist philosopher who argued that finite minds belong within an all-encompassing Absolute. Royce developed an American version centered on interpretation, community, and the Absolute.

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