Preface In the service of the Darwinian struggle for power and existence, technology is relentlessly driving us towards a globalized world with some ten billion human inhabitants. To manage the global commons, we need more wisdom than ever. But "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?", as T.S. Eliot once asked. Perhaps in the European philosophy since some 2.500 years? The respect for law and the freedom of expression are two rather unique European ideas. Ours is the only civilization where legal opposition to the rulers-that-be has ever been institutionalized. The difficulties have been great; no ruler likes opposition. Many of my philosophers in this book have published anonymously, have been prosecuted, exiled or killed. But with their suffering, they have carried us forward. That is why I have created this little "philosophical park" on one of the most beautiful spots, Belvedere di Migliara in Anacapri, on one of the most beautiful islands of the world, Capri. So far as I know, it is the first of its kind in Europe. My own "meditations" are highly subjective. The common thread is that I suspect the players in the globalizing power game of being much more biologically driven than they themselves normally would like to think. That goes for you, for professors and for myself, as well. I dedicate this park to Marianne, my wife. For soon it will be half a century that we have exchanged a kiss or two under the oaks in another park, Djurgården in Stockholm. Those oaks are the private property of the King of Sweden. His Majesty has now kindly

given us a piece of one of them, felled by a storm. This now forms one of the benches of the park. We and our visitors will thus be able to rest our tired behinds - in a most Royal way - while contemplating the meditations upon the wisdom of the West. Warm thanks, Your Majesty! Without the generosity of the late avvocato Antonio Pascotto and his wife Anna Ludovica Habig this park would not have come into existence. Many other people have also helped us in one way or another, some more than others. Among them are Kerstin Bellerba, Astrid Capoferro, Mats Carlberg Jr., Erik and Gudrun Cornell, Ingrid Cornell, Mariah Freemole - who gently corrected my Swenglish, - Antonio Galasso, Harald von Knorring, Aniello Maresca, Michele Maresca with family, Ingrid Molander, Barbro Styrenius, Gunilla Svedin, Madeleine and Rune Tryggvesson, the family Vanacore-Aversa, Leif Zetterling and Pyrre Hahn with Örjan Öberg. The inscriptions have been made by four Anacapresian artists: Saverio Cacace, Sergio di Pace, Sergio Rubino, and Franco Senesi. To all of them and many others, a warm thank you! March 6, 2000 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson.