There comes a point when a philosophic work is so influential that people forget what it actually said, and how important it is in the light of today's developments. This is exactly the case with Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", which remains startlingly contempary when closely read. The complex sections on epistemology, and the mediation of "the This", and the negativity of "the This", in fact contain, in a different form, most of the epistemological insights (although from a completely different direction) of much of Derrida's work (especially "Speech and Phenomena"), while Hegel's view of theology has not been properly surpassed by any modern theologian. Even phenomenology owes most of its most important aspects to Hegel - while Husserl was more Kantian than Hegelian, Heidegger and Derrida both showed how with Husserlian premises we inevitably end up with Hegelian conclusions. While arguably Hegel's work would never have existed were it not for Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", this is an exaggeration, as while Hegel's work would have taken a different form, what is amazing about this is the little it relies upon previous philosophers, with only two or three scattered references to Plato, Fichte and Kant. Also, most of the pomposity and over-totalisation which philosophers like Sartre attribute to Hegel is only the result of his later philosophy. In fact, phenomenology, deconstruction and all modern developments in epistemolgy and theology can be seen as simply elaborations of certain themes in the "Phenomenology". While it is true that we cannot say Hegel hasn't been improved upon at all, it is also true that a return to the "Phenomenology", in light of modern philosophical developments, could well be the best idea for modern philosophy, after Adorno's bleak "Negative Dialectics".