The label has also been attached to others such as Josiah Royce, an American philosopher who was greatly influenced by Hegel's work, and the British idealists.
Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all, there must be in some sense an identity of thought and being.
The absolute idealist position dominated philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain and Germany, while exerting significantly less influence in the United States.
[4][clarification needed] According to the scholar Andrew Bowie, Hegel's system depends upon showing how each view and positing of how the world is really has an internal contradiction: "This necessarily leads thought to more comprehensive ways of grasping the world, until the point where there can be no more comprehensive way because there is no longer any contradiction to give rise to it.
"[8] Hegel's doubts about intellectual intuition's ability to prove or legitimate that the particular is in identity with whole led him to progressively formulate a speculative dialectic in which concepts like Aufhebung came to be articulated.
[9][failed verification]Hegel's innovation in German Idealism was to theorize a historical mode of self-consciousness self-reflection capable of generating a more inclusively holistic understanding of what it ultimately means to be rational in the grand scheme of things.
Figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and J. F. Ferrier, found in idealism an alternative and a response to the then-dominant empiricist views in Britain.
[10] Early authors such as James Hutchison Stirling not only attempted to introduce German idealist thought to Britain, but sought to present their own version of absolute idealism in an English medium.
After the 1927 publication, Heidegger's "early dismissal of them [German idealists] gives way to ever-mounting respect and critical engagement."
He continued to compare and contrast his philosophy with Absolute idealism, principally due to critical comments that certain elements of this school of thought anticipated Heideggerian notions of "overcoming metaphysics.