ABSTRACT
This chapter examines figures that encountered Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in an academic intellectual context and consciously used Hegelian ideas, though one terminated his allegiance and the other never fully called himself Hegelian: David Friedrich Strauss and F. H. Bradley. Bradley embodies a form of Idealism that is inspired by but openly sceptical about Hegel's claims. Strauss was educated at the Stift in Tübingen and in 1832 became a Repetent there. In the introduction to Das Leben Jesu, Strauss explains what he understands by 'representation'. The best-known attack on Strauss appeared in 1873, the year after the book's publication, with Friedrich Nietzsche's untimely meditation on David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller. Bradley is the philosopher of the Absolute. This is defined in his major work Appearance and Reality. Bradley's view of thought and the Absolute, and the possibility of self-transcendence he suggests for finite centres, show both a Hegelian and a Leibnizian inheritance.
