The question for man

Abstract

In his insatiable desire to make reality intelligible, man's rational knowledge has been broken on a tortuous and long journey of twenty-six centuries of history, through which he has paraded a whole constellation of thinkers, each with his own particular way of conceiving reality, and countless schools that, as a rule, have exhibited as disparate and opposing doctrines. All this, as we can well assume, forms a vast panorama, varied and extremely complex, which obliges, for the sake of order and clarity, to establish that range of classifications that kindly, and after arduous task, offer us the different historians of thought. Of all these, however, there is one that by its diaphanousness and accuracy we wish to bring up here: we mean that pointed out by Francisco Alvarez González, who divides the history of human discourse into three major stages, based on those areas of reality that have aroused man's curiosity and which, therefore, have become his main objects of study and concern. In line with the above, and following the same order in which they have historically appeared, our author points, first, to a cosmocentric stage, corresponding to antiquity, another, then theocentric, inserted in the Middle Ages, and finally, the one that, starting in Modernity and unfolding to this day, designates with the name of anthropocentric. These stadiums therefore correspond to the three great and universal themes - the world, man and God - which over time have set in motion the philosophical work and which, a! intertwining inextricably, they encompass the whole reality, thus describing a kind of "closed universe", beyond which there is no longer any point in wondering, so, we assume, nothing is behind it anymore.