Another character in my book is Hegel. He acts as a dialectical foil to Kierkegaard—they are enemies, but you can’t have the one without the other. He’s not the most famous of philosophers, but some of the ideas, concepts, and terms he popularized most certainly are. Amongst these are the Zeitgeist, synthesis, the end of history, and the master-slave dialectic. Some say he’s the greatest of all philosophers because he built a system that explained everything, and still does. Others say he’s a smart-arse, gobbledygook-speaking, know-it-all who gives philosophy a bad name.

He appears in several chapters and is discussed in several more. These scenes range from a party at my house, where he is heckled by a bunch of drunk post-structuralists and stroppy existential thinkers, to the final scene of Hamlet, where he plays the King, and Kierkegaard eggs me on to slay him.