ABSTRACT
Tracing the story of a philosophical outlook is seeing how philosophy interacts with those parameters-responding to its own necessities, generating new questions, slowly shifting the parameters. Some past philosophies cease to be options for us. Others remain as earlier castings of traditions which are still in play. Wherever there is philosophical thought of distinction there is something to learn. The first case at the least gives us a view of ourselves from a diverging path. In the latter we take stock in another way. We get a benchmark against which to measure current philosophical assumptions, and an improved sense of what is transient in them and what is more likely to endure.
