In Hegel’s time, the idea that philosophy had a historical development had only recently come into focus. Both Fichte and Schelling had discussed the idea of a history of reason following Kant’s allusion to such a notion in the closing pages of Critique of Pure Reason, and systematic approaches to the history of philosophy had emerged like that of W.G. Tennemann, who presupposed a type of Kantian framework. Clearly Hegel’s history of philosophy would be a present-centered one, in which the philosophical narrative would reveal a development up to the point represented by his own philosophy as its culmination. It is thus predictably Eurocentric: philosophy “commences in the West” because the West is where “this freedom of self-consciousness first comes forth” (LHP I: 99). There is an important caveat to add here, however. Philosophy is often identified with the capacity for abstract thought, and this is not confined to Europe and its history. Rather, it is typical of eastern cultures like those of India and China. As we have seen in the context of art, Hegel identifies Greek culture with a type of at-homeness in the world—what we might think of as the opposite of a tendency to abstraction and its typical attraction to the transcendent or other-worldly.