This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being as what Hegel describes elsewhere as a “finite-infinite”, (SL: 114) has led to Hegel being regarded in different ways by different types of philosophical readers.  For example, an historically-minded pragmatist like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the so-called God’s-eye view, could praise Hegel as a philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective dimension into philosophy (and set it on the characteristically romantic path which has predominated in modern continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still remained bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for ahistorical truths (Rorty 1982).  Those adopting such an approach to Hegel tend to have in mind the (relatively) young author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and have tended to dismiss as “metaphysical” later and more systematic works like the Science of Logic. In contrast, the British Hegelian movement at the end of the nineteenth century tended to ignore the Phenomenology and the more historicist dimensions of his thought, and found in Hegel a systematic metaphysician whose Logic provided the basis for a definitive philosophical ontology. This latter traditional metaphysical view of Hegel dominated Hegel reception for most of the twentieth century, but from the 1980s came to be challenged by scholars who offered an alternative non-metaphysical, post-Kantian view. By “non-metaphysical” these thinkers had in mind metaphysics in the sense that Kant had been critical of, a point sometimes missed by critics. But in turn, this post-Kantian reading has been challenged by a revised metaphysical view, critical of the purported over-assimilation of Hegel to Kant by the post-Kantians. In the revised metaphysical view, appeal is often made to Aristotelian or Spinozist conceptual realist features of Hegel’s thought, as well as to features of recent analytic metaphysics.