The fact that this progression ends in the attainment of what Hegel refers to as Absolute Knowing, the standpoint from which real philosophy gets done, seems to support the traditionalist reading in which a triumphalist narrative of the growth of western civilization is combined with the theological interpretation of God’s self-manifestation and self-comprehension. When Kant had broached the idea of a phenomenological propaedeutic to Lambert, he himself had still believed in the project of a purely conceptual metaphysics achievable by the use of the regressive or analytic method, but this project conceived as an exercise in theoretical reason was just what Kant in his later critical philosophy had come to disavow. Traditional readers of Hegel thus see the Phenomenology’s telos as attesting to Hegel’s pre-Kantian (that is, pre-critical) outlook, and his embrace of the metaphysical project that Kant famously came to dismiss as illusory.  Supporters of the post-Kantian interpretation of Hegel obviously interpret this work and its telos differently. For example, it has been argued (e.g., Pinkard 1994) that what this history tracks is the development of a type of social existence which enables a unique form of rationality, in that in such a society all dogmatic bases of thought have been gradually replaced by a system in which all claims become open to rational self-correction, by becoming exposed to demands for conceptually-articulated justifications. As Pinkard had pointed out in that work, this was a conception of the normatively structured practices of human reason found in the American pragmatist Wilfrid Sellars, the inspiration behind the Hegelian dimensions of analytic philosophers such as Willem deVries (1988), Robert Brandom and John McDowell.