Abstract

In a certain sense the fate of philosophy has been tragic. In antiquity the term "philosophy" meant true scientific knowledge, and we retained this sense of philosophy, on the whole, until the eighteenth century. But beginning then the special sciences, differentiating as independent disciplines, gradually took over areas of problems that had at one time been within the purview of their mother, philosophy, and with which the past glory and significance of dialectics was largely connected. In the course of the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, the special sciences attained vast successes in their development, a fact that has found concentrated expression in the current revolution in science and technology