As I have tried to show in this essay, the reception of Hegel's philosophy in art history--within the Anglophone context, especially-proposes inadequate understandings of the method of the philosopher's work. What art history fails to appreciate is that, according to the opening philosophical manoeuvre of the Phenomenology, Hegel proposes a powerful dialectical negation of the very injunction to elaborate a method that comes before recognition that thought is always already in the movement of philosophical knowledge. In this sense, Hegel has no method, at least not in any strict theoretical sense of the term (the axiomatic rules and regulations that allow a subject to perceive and know an object). Rather, the philosopher develops a speculative social ontology that articulates the movement of being and its truth-in other words, a profoundly metaphysical endeavour, but one in which metaphysics is fully mediated by non-metaphysical processes. Perhaps, then, art history should neither turn to Hegel's Philosophy of History nor his Aesthetics-each one offering the discipline a model for thinking the two terms that render it intelligible (history and art) but should, rather, turn to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit when considering issues of methodology.