Contemporary philosophy is marked by especially diverse formulations of its questions. Completely different tendencies and traditions are active, which are distinguished as much by the content of the problems as by the methods of working on them. Thus the contemporary situation offers, along with a fullness of themes, a large number of modes of inquiry, a fact that makes it difficult to characterize our philosophical ‘epoch’ in a neat form. Not only different, but divergent directions of inquiry define its image.