In this area nowadays a special task awaits philosophical research. The men and women of science and of culture have been entrusted with a special responsibility for truth - to strive for it, to defend it and to live in accordance with it. We are all familiar with the difficulties bound up with the human search for truth, chief of which are scepticism, agnosticism, relativism and nihilism. Attempts are often made to convince people that we have reached the twilight of the age of certitude in the knowledge of truth, and that we are irrevocably condemned to the total absence of meaning, the provisional nature of all knowledge, and to permanent instability and relativity. In this situation it appears imperative to reaffirm a basic confidence in human reason and its capacity to know the truth, including absolute and definitive truth.
Man is capable of elaborating a uniform and organic conception of knowledge.
The fragmentation of knowledge destroys man's inner unity. Contemporary scholarship, and especially present-day philosophy, each in its own sphere, needs to rediscover that sapiential dimension which consists in the search for the definitive and overall meaning of human existence. The search for truth is carried on not only through the toil of individuals in libraries or laboratories, but it also has a community dimension. Human perfection consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowledge of the truth, but in a dynamic relationship of faithful self-giving with others. It is in this faithful self- giving that a person finds a fullness of certainty and security.