Book excerpt: The twenty-first century needs a new paradigm for philosophy, because both Anglo-American and Continental philosophy have ended in analytic sterility and deconstructive nihilism. They have ignored the radical reality of human life, which all other realities must presuppose. Three European philosophers in the twentieth century - Dilthey, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset - began to develop this idea, but never before has it been systematically conceptualized and adequately expounded. With reference to the works of these philosophers, this book examines the major categories and essential properties of human life as it is lived, for example, in time, circumstance, history, and understanding.