Turning to the history of philosophical thought, I am surprised by the question what is knowledge? I am surprised because usually we do not reflect on our own knowledge; it appears to us as something obvious. And yet this question has disturbed people since the beginning philosophical thinlung. Moreover, at the time knowledge appeared as a subject full of aporiasintellectual difficulties and obvious contradictions of judgment. This led to the humiliating doubt that man could know anything about the world in (...) which he lived and, thus, exposed, so to speak, the painful nerve of the cognitive aspirations of human reason. (shrink)

My young friends advise me to write my memoirs. For me this is comforting. The future is unpredictable. The present is dark—it is "without repentance or hope" and only the past is remembered. The reawakening of interest in events long ago is a sign that a new view of things is forming: history—the knowledge of the past—forms us, for it lives in our actions. People of the past are our contemporaries: the results of their labors are part of our everyday (...) life. Their insights and mistakes live with us and in us. Contemporary life is only the surface layer of human existence. Faith in the intellectual intuition of the young generation gives hope that the pallid lines of the past I remember might clarify a little the problems of the present time. (shrink)