Continuity of Partition

Throughout the history of culture, particularly in philosophy, there existed – and still exist – numerous ways of contemplating  human's place in the world and our relationship with the universe. Moving from myth to philosophy and from religion to  science, human culture has acquired enormous richness and diversity. This has led to the emergence of multiple directions, tendencies, and philosophical schools that address the central issues of human life, consciousness, society, science and  technologies, ethics and logic, aesthetics and language, etc., etc. In observing these, historians of philosophy often attempt to  somehow systematize them, dividing the diverse and multifaceted directions of thought into large groups opposed to each  other in one or more aspects. More often than not, these divisions are bipolar, making the manifoldness of worldviews accessible  for analysis.However, any analysis calls for synthesis which generally means 'taking a higher standing' by the commentator, summoning the ability to generalize and go beyond the specifics. The primary aim of this paper is to display the waving  trajectories of philosophical debates showing the continuity of partition – and the reverse movement towards synthesis, sometimes even harmony, – or to fusion, which is often erratic. This paper primarily focuses on two pairs of opposing trends in  philosophy: namely, these of essentialism / relativism and empiricism / rationalism, as well as two couples of closely linked  concepts: nature/essence and reason/rationality. In conclusion, the paper introduces the author's theory of cognition, termed  existential materialism, to academia and all the reading public.