History and context of journalism lecture/reading two:

A paradigm of change; German Idealism 

Kant:
Believes we have an intrinsic knowledge of whats right and what is wrong - a moral law. His ideas are contemporary with romanticism and can be seen through Keats idea that 'beauty is truth'. Ideas of Kant conflict with those of Hume; he believes that Hume dismisses the existence of science when he disregards metaphysics.
Kant aimed to safe guard knowledge from previous doctrines; he emphasised the importance of mind over matter which lead to his belief that the mind only truly exists; everything else is questionable.
His most important book is 'The Critique of Pure Reason' which aims to prove knowledge to be partly a priori and not entirely from experience.  
He separates analytic and synthetic propositions  then distinguished between empirical and a priori propositions.
Analytical propositions: is a predicate (conclusion of the proposition) which is part of a subject.
Synthetic propositions: knowledge through experience only; influences categorical imperatives.
Empirical knowledge: things aren't known without sense perception and comes from observational data; are true.
A priori knowledge: established through experience but has a basis other than our experiences.

His ideas of knowledge lead him to the conclusion that the following proofs of God aren't true.
Ontological - 'god is the most real thing therefore subject of all predicate that belong to absolute, and God is absolute.'
Cosmological - 'If anything exists then an absolute necessary being must exist.'
Physio-theological - 'the universe exhibits an order which is evidence of purpose and proves someone designed it.'

For Kant existence is most important; the existence of the universe is simply a necessary precondition of space and time. Existence just is, it is not a result of anything and is why he disregards the existence of god being absolute.
Kant is agnostic and believes in synthetic a priori knowledge, which is reasoning; we dont know for a fact but strongly believe it to be true and relies on intuition. He believes everyone to have the intuition of what is right and what is wrong, despite not stopping us doing the wring thing. This is the idea of de-ontological moral system, one which is rule based. 
Synthetic a priori relies on nuomenal; the object in itself and cannot be know by definition, and phenomena; the object as it is perceived.

Hegel:
Hegel believes in the unreality of separateness; that the world is not a collection of hard units, each self subsistent. Instead he believes this to be an illusion and that nothing is completely real unless it is part of a whole. Though his idea of the whole being reality differs from Parmenides and Spinoza in conceiving the whole, not as a simple substance, but a complex system.
For Hegel separate things are of less or greater degrees of reality and its reality consists in an aspect of a whole which is seen when it is viewed truly.
He says 'real is rational, and the rational is real', but real is this sense is not what an empiricist would could consider. Instead he means that after the apparent character has been transformed by viewing them as aspects of a whole are they rational.
DIALECTIC;
Hegel takes a teleological approach to history, believing that history has a set goal and is headed somewhere. Everything happens for a reason and so history must be understood as a thing in itself. This is said to be influenced by Darwin in his theory of evolution with the idea that things will keep improving to suit the environment.
The idea of the dialect is to decipher what is absolute by finding the thesis, antithesis (both can be described as conflicting forces), and synthesis (a new 'whole' produced from the thesis and antithesis). Any suggested predicate of the absolute to the final conclusion of the dialectic, which is the absolute idea, and the dialectical process is based on the assumption that nothing can be true unless it is about reality as a whole. There is a universal soul, Hegel describes as the 'Geist' (the nature if the thing in itself)  but alienation stops something from truly knowing itself, hence the dialectic.