This volume offers three writings by Max Scheler, composed between 1911 and 1917, entitled: "The essence of philosophy and the moral condition of philosophical knowledge", "Phenomenology and Gnoseology" and "The theory of the three facts". These texts constitute the earliest, most systematic and direct elaborations on philosophy itself and on the theory of knowledge held by Max Scheler. In them it is possible to know precisely how the author truly conceived philosophy in general and the phenomenological way of philosophizing in particular – a way, by the way, different from the one conceived by Husserl.

In an age like the present, in which we live so confused and indecisive between the cognitive answers of science, of everyday life and of various pseudo-philosophical constructs, there is an urgent need for genuinely philosophical reflections as luminous and radical as those that Scheler offers us here.