Publisher's Synopsis
Everything is always changing--our ideas, wills, and opinions. What is true today may not be true tomorrow; whatever we see as "true" at a given moment is not objectively so but rather represents the victory of a particular will and opinion against the others working within us. We are constantly changing goal posts and competing for dominance. A number of philosophers have asserted that an in-depth study of the history of philosophy reveals bitter enmities among philosophers arguing for their ideas from which emerge conflicting philosophies in the form of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. As clearly traced in this book, it started with the philosophies of Heracleitus against Parmenides, Plato against the Sophists, Descartes against the empiricists, Catholic scholastics and Hume against Descartes, Kant against Hume. The line continues to African philosophers against Western philosophers, to the utilitarians against pragmatists. This book, presenting one of the most in-depth studies on Hegelian dialectic, illustrates in a very unique way that the disagreement between various philosophers and their philosophies--when adequately understood--illustrates not conflict but the growth and development of philosophy toward objective and absolute truth. One needs to understand how Hegelian dialectic works in its triadic movement to be able to grasp how it is inherent in every sphere of life, the most being in politics and evolution of the forms of governance that is at the center of discussion in this must-read book.
