Free Republic

For German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, life was a process of constant change. The father of the "zeitgeist" was born 250 years ago. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher who would go on to be one of the most famous thinkers of his era, was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, in southwest Germany. His parents practiced Pietism, a Lutheran reform movement that emphasized personal religious experience. Hegel, who showed an affinity for math and Latin, was at the top of his class in school. His parents hoped he would become a priest and sent him to...

The Delphi Technique and consensus building are both founded in the same principle - the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, with synthesis becoming the new thesis. In group settings, the Delphi Technique is an unethical method of achieving consensus on controversial topics. It requires well-trained professionals, known as "facilitators" or "change agents," who deliberately escalate tension among group members, pitting one faction against another to make a preordained viewpoint appear "sensible," while making opposing views appear ridiculous. The facilitators or change agents encourage each person in a group to express concerns about the programs, projects, or policies in...

The race is on to build a machine that can synthesize any organic compound. It could transform chemistry.In faded photographs from the 1960s, organic-chemistry laboratories look like an alchemist's paradise. Bottles of reagents line the shelves; glassware blooms from racks of wooden pegs; and scientists stoop over the bench as they busily build molecules. Fast-forward 50 years, and the scene has changed substantially. A lab in 2014 boasts a battery of fume cupboards and analytical instruments — and no one is smoking a pipe. But the essence of what researchers are doing is the same. Organic chemists typically plan their...

The case of Christopher Hitchens is emblematic of so many things: how success can ruin a writer, how far an aristocratic British accent can get you on the American scene, how Trotskyism can morph into Rumsfeld-ism without any visible exertion. The former features editor of the Socialist Worker newspaper is today the Court Polemicist of the War Party, whose jeremiads now grace the glossy pages of Vanity Fair magazine. His evolution, more clearly and interestingly than any other figure, maps the progress of a new ideology, a political phenomenon unique to our time, one that is neither "left" nor "right."...