Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher who asserted that all history was a progression towards a perfect state of being. He developed a new form of logic called speculation, which has come to be known as Hegelian dialectics.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a great 17th-century rationalist and philosopher, argued that God created a good world; in order to know, understand, and ultimately choose good, we must have an understanding of its opposite - evil. He believes that coexisting with evil was the “best of all possible worlds.” This belief is misconstrued and satirized in Voltaire's Candide.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, was one of the leading modern day philosophers. Kant’s views are known as critical philosophy, or a critique, rather than a justification, of knowledge. That is, can explore the limits of human understanding and capacity for reason. Jacques Derrida was an Algerian born French philosopher and founder of the deconstruction. One of the most often cited quotations is “ to pretend, I actually do the thing: I therefore have only pretended to pretend.”