ABSTRACT
Since the seventeenth century, the overwhelmingly dominant tradition in philosophy has taken metaphysics and epistemology, and frequently an epistemologically based metaphysics, to be the core of philosophy. It is metaphysics and epistemology that will provide, if can only get the really true metaphysical and epistemological view, the foundation for life. So let see where can go with philosophy conceived as concerned with the problems of human beings and indeed, centrally, with the problems of human beings of a given time and place. Neither the liberal nor the Marxist theoreticians of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the import of nationalism. It was generally rather optimistically thought that as economic wealth developed, as it became more evenly distributed, as regimes became more democratic, society more tolerant, and as the level of education rose, nationalism would gradually wither away.
