George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher born in 1770 who developed a comprehensive philosophical system called German Idealism. He believed that reality is a rational whole that evolves through contradictions and negations to reach higher levels of truth and understanding. His major works explored the dialectical relationships between concepts like mind and nature, subject and object, and freedom and necessity. Hegel's writings were difficult to understand due to his use of complex speculative logic and dialectics to develop a new form of philosophical thinking.