Re Hegel and Kant, i thought the following was helpful from quora:
https://www.quora.com/profile/Matt-Perryman
"Kant described his solution to the problems of dogmatism, on the one hand, and Hume's skepticism about causality, on the other, as a Copernican turn in philosophy. It is not our minds that conform to the world, in the manner that Descartes, Locke, and Hume would have it, but the other way around: it is the conceptual activity of our minds on what is given to us in sensation that creates the world as it appears to us.
Kant pays a price for this move: since the world as it appears to us is necessarily a product of what is intuited in sensation
as structured by the activity of the transcendental subject, he must give up the possibility of perceiving or conceiving anything about the world as it is in itself, independently of our mental activities. Kant has given up on metaphysics in order to explain the possibility of knowledge. In that move we arrive at the famous distinction between
phenomena, that which appears to us as it must appear to us, and
noumena, or the things in themselves.
Hegel's critique of Kant centers on this distinction. Following on the ground laid by Fichte and Schelling in the post-Kantian elaboration of the critical philosophy, Hegel holds that we do in fact have the noumena in thought -- for Kant has the thing itself in mind when he
conceives of it as that about which we can know nothing!
What Hegel is saying, then, is that by positing the limit to thought, Kant has inadvertently brought what is
beyond thought
back into thought. What is by definition unthinkable is nevertheless being thought in the very process of making the point. This has two central consequences for Hegel's project:
1. The identity of subject and object. Since the noumenal is revealed as another manifestation of phenomena, what is unthinkable is also thinkable. Since what is thinkable depends on the necessary conceptual activity of rational beings, the consequence is that the noumenal world beyond thought is also dependent upon thought.
The Kantian subject is identical with its own object.
2. The priority of flux or change over what is fixed and given. There is a contradiction in point (1): what is posited as unthinkable is, at the same time, thinkable. Ordinarily, we could not say that "p" and "not-p" are simultaneously true. One of Hegel's innovations (or mistakes, depending on who you ask) is the acceptance of true contradictions in the form of the
determinate negation. Hegel's project in the
Phenomenology of Mind is a working-through of the unfolding of consciousness and Reason as it begins with immediate sense-certainties. What Hegel argues is that what seems to us as given in immediate sensation is anything but; to focus on a "bit" of sensation, say a patch of color or a flavor, is not to grasp an object-like
thing, but to actually experience an underlying process. Colors and tastes change in intensity; so do all of our sensory perceptions and concepts in thought. What seems to us as a fixed and orderly
Being is unmasked as a deeper process of historically-unfolding
becoming.
The upshot of these two points is that the Kantian subject, understood as the transcendental and universal synthetic a priori knowledge that necessarily structures our perceptions and conceptions, loses its "given" status. For Hegel, even that subject is a historically-contingent outcome of a process of nature struggling with itself in light of the dialectical contradiction. Thus
what Kant posits as the timeless and universal structure of thought is, in actuality, conditioned by its own process of development. What Kant saw in us was not given, but itself a part of history's unfolding towards the Absolute."