There is a word of Fate, an old decree
And everlasting of the gods, made fast
With amplest oaths, that whosoever of those Far spirits, with their lot of age-long life,
Do foul their limbs with slaughter in offense, Or swear forsworn, as failing of their pledge, Shall wander thrice ten thousand weary years Far from the Blessed, and be born through time In various shapes of mortal kind, which change Ever and ever troublous paths of life:
For now Air hunts them onward to the Sea;
Now the wild Sea disgorges them on Land;
Now Earth will spue toward beams of radiant Sun;
Whence he will toss them back to whirling Air Each gets from other what they all abhor.
And in that brood I too am numbered now,
A fugitive and vagabond from heaven,
As one obedient unto raving Strife.
For I was once already boy and girl,
Thicket and bird, and mute fish in the waves
In: Fragments of Empedocles
(Expiation and Metempsychosis)
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This is a panoramic view of the development of Philosophy since its early years in China and India, and, then, through the centuries, in Europe. Obviously, taking into account the Greek impetus.
By page 120 I was starting to have doubts about the utility of 20th century Philosophy and its future, in the West, because Ducassé was writing “it looks like Philosophy is dissolving in Science and this one becoming philosophical” and “Philosophy risks both: loosing the autonomy of its method and the value of its object”.
I am glad now that in the next pages Ducassé suggests new directions. For a book of the sixties, the case of Emmanuel Mounier's PERSONALISM looked like a very interesting development/direction. And yet, Ducassé recalled a time of "emptiness of philosophical consciousness".
"Hegel remains the imposing and monstrous architect of the imperialism of the impersonal ideas (...) Kierkegaard for his part, confronting the "System" as represented by Hegel and his spiritual imitators, maintains the irreducibility of the source and spring of Liberty"
Emmanuel Mounier
I fully agree with his introductory lines: "We all feel, since childhood, the need to explain the universe. (...) Man never gives up the desire to know". As long as there are those who question and seek (true) explanations, the future of Philosophy is guaranteed.