history of philosophy

"And just as in the case of an individual, so, and even more so in the case of an entire civilization, it develops across time. Its present state at any given time cannot be understood except as an outgrowth from its past. The errors of today are built on the errors of the last century, and they in turn on the previous, and so on back to the childhood of the Western world, which is ancient Greece. To understand what exactly are the root errors of today's world, why these errors developed, how, how they clashed with and are progressively submerging its good premises, and therefore to understand what to do to cure the patient, you have to reconstruct the intellectual history of the Western world."