2,400 years ago, the government of the city of Athens condemned Socrates, the first of the philosophers, to death, accused of impiety and corruption of youth. In our country, the Lomce ~M -1. again condemns the Philosophy, relegating the subject of History of the Philosophy to an option in the Study program of 2nd year of high school diploma of Humanities and Social Sciences. This decision inevitably brings to report the famous sentence of our philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

What a far cry from Étienne Gilson's assertion in his William James Lectures (Harvard,1936-37) that the history of the Philosophy is the laboratory of thought, the true test bed of the Philosophy. Why give up the history of thought and ideas, which is what, in the end written request, can most help us to understand the present? It seems to me that the radical answer is that the powerful and the State apparatus prefer that citizens do not think on their own; they consider that the tidbits and entertainment of video games and reality shows that anesthetize the citizenry are enough.

Barbarism is advancing and gradually taking over the collective space: it is enough to watch the television news, which have become a spectacular chronicle of events. The barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire also thought they were bringing progress with them. As in the Age average, those of us who dedicate ourselves to think and to invite others to think -that is what philosophers and professors of Philosophy are- are being marginalized from society; we are confined in the ivory tower of our specialization so that no one can hear our voice of denunciation. That is why they want to eliminate the History of Philosophy from the secondary teaching ; because they do not want the adults of tomorrow to be able to think with rigor and freedom.

But does a subject really matter that much? The answer is yes. The History of Philosophy is the best vaccine against the dominant relativism. We find ourselves in a society that lives in an impossible amalgam of a generalized skepticism about values and a so-called scientistic fundamentalism about facts. It is a mixture of a naive confidence in Science with a capital letter and that perspectivist relativism expressed by the poet Ramón de Campoamor with his "there is neither truth nor lies; everything is according to the color of the glass through which one looks at it". Whoever studies the history of thought immediately recognizes that this is not so, that
-As Stanley Cavellhay writes, there are better and worse ways of thinking about things, and that through contrast with experience and rational dialogue, human beings are capable of recognizing the superiority of one opinion over another.

The question of the role of reason in our lives and in our civilization is probably the central philosophical question that pervades the last two centuries of Western culture and the Philosophy . We philosophers, who - in Edmund Husserlnos' expression - feel as "servants of humanity", have a great responsibility towards our fellow citizens, like Socrates towards Athens. With our work we are not only transmitting the philosophical knowledge to new generations, but we are keeping alive the flame of free and rigorous thought, the flame of how to be human in fullness.

The history of Philosophy is, in this sense, of paramount importance. It is a subject that provides some of the keys for students to grow in confidence in their own way of thinking, which is the most effective means of solving - almost always provisionally - the problems that arise in life. In addition, financial aid encourages young people to be open to the opinions and experiences of others, to decide to learn from others, and thus to expand their capacity to love. This is no small claim. As Hannah Arendt emphasized, only if everyone lives creatively, thinking radically, can he or she resist the banality that is, at final, the greatest danger hanging over our lives today.

There is sometimes talk of saving the Arctic, because it is melting at an accelerated rate. It seems to me that almost nobody talks about saving the Philosophy, which is for human beings an even more vital territory. The attack on the subject History Philosophy in the high school diploma is the tip of a huge iceberg that really aims to destroy our culture.