The course attempts to analyze the response of leading European and domestic thought to the challenge of modernity. Definitions are considered in which strict philosophy sees the world, its real situation and its tasks. The history of the new philosophy, starting with Hegel and the Hegelian schools, is thought out as a single ongoing work of understanding the human situation in the world. The hypothesis is tested, according to which the problems of the whole world, identity, nothing and nihilism, ontology as ethics, decisive for the fate of modern civilization, are consciously or unconsciously put by leading thinkers of the last two centuries at the center of their interests.