Hegel

Sorry for my terribly inarticulate explanations of Hegel and Hegelian philosophy this afternoon. I'm fatigued! Here are a few sites that can help:

General:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/easy.htm

The idea of a dialectic, or the thesis-antithesis-synthesis relationship:
http://www.calvertonschool.org/waldspurger/pages/hegelian_dialectic.htm

Subjective idealism:
http://www.britannica.com/bps/topic/570743/subjective-idealism#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked%3E%2Fbps%2Ftopic%2F570743%2Fsubjective-idealism&title=subjective%20idealism%20--%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(190103)10%3A2%3C139%3ATN'ASI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

Dialectical materialism, or Marxist uses of Hegel's dialectic:
http://www.marxist.com/Theory/study_guide1.html

Thoughts on politics, human nature, the state of nature:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/mansour.htm

Relationship of the individual to nature, or the "mountain" in Dr. Kalter's feeble memory:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-41241/Georg-Wilhelm-Friedrich-Hegel

And from wikipedia, which has a clearer context for this same idea:

The concept of freedom through Hegel's method

Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broadly Platonic tradition that includes Aristotle and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Bahlsen, Spinoza, Plotinus, Jakob Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus) of the "soul" as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While Aristotle criticizes Plato's "Forms," he preserves Plato's preoccupation with the ontological implications of self-determination, in his conceptions of ethical reasoning, the hierarchy of soul in nature, the order of the cosmos, and the prime mover. Kant, likewise, preserves this preoccupation of Plato's in his notions of moral and noumenal freedom, and God.

In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as "by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic" (par. 378). And in his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel's concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality, and with their ontological implications, is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant's dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within "true infinity," the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff), "Spirit," and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible (as mentioned above), rather than remaining a brute "given."

...

The result of this argument is that finite and infinite—and, by extension, particular and universal, nature and freedom—don't face one another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former.^[19] Thus rather than being merely "given," without explanation, the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible. And a challenge is issued to reductive and eliminative programs like materialism and empiricism: What kind of "reality" do your fundamental entities or data possess?