This book does not aspire to be a general introduction to the entirety of human philosophical inquiries throughout the course of history. It is not primarily of a historical nature, nor does it exhaust the philosophical views and theories related to the topics addressed within its pages.

The method of this book is abstract-synthetic, not comparative-descriptive. This means that: from the vast material of the History of Philosophy, many elements are omitted (the completeness of recording the variety of approaches is sacrificed) in order to achieve a synthesis capable of introducing the reader to fundamental philosophical questions and the most significant (for their historical consequences) methods of addressing these questions.

It is therefore a sketch of an introduction to the way of philosophizing, rather than primarily to the history of questions and answers. References to the History of Philosophy are as many as can serve as an introduction to the 'ways' that determine philosophical inquiry. And these 'ways' are two in the history of philosophizing: the ‘sociocentric’ way of the Greeks and the ‘individualistic’ way of post-Roman European West.

On the two shores of the Aegean Sea and in the intervening archipelago, for the first time in human history, the question of the validity of knowledge was born: when is knowledge true, and when is it false - critical thinking, philosophy was born. The Greeks sought the 'criterion of truth': Something is true if it does not change, does not decay, does not die. And the only empirically accessible reality that 'immortalizes', thus 'becomes true', for the Greek is 'the way of the governance of all things.'

[Excerpt from the text of the preface]