ABSTRACT
The great novelty of contemporary thought was formulated: an act of speculative courage by which the tormenting problem of knowledge found a solution. The construction of a new language—often the streamlining of ordinary language by stripping it of all but physically validated enunciations—is the main preoccupation of contemporary philosophy, granting the artificer a double satisfaction. As Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the contemporary critics's mentors, would comment, any truth, all truths serve only man's survival instinct. K. O. Apel, Jurgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty, kindle illusions when they advise contemporary man to live in concord, dialoguing and setting up a consensual society. The contemporary trend is logically, one might say historically, linked to industrial-democratic society. The contemporary trend with its source in Immanuel Kant, reinforced by Nietzsche, and reaching its apogee with the structuralists, will yield, probably soon, to another philosophical focus.
