Is there a crisis of philosophy and metaphysics?

Philosophy and its transformation at the end of the century and millennium - a specific problem of the present time, or a normal stage of the dynamic development of philosophical thinking? Philosophy usually dissolves in the web of culture at large. By all indications, western philosophy is now expe riencing another self-questioning phase in its history. From various quarte rs of contemporary philosophical thinking we hear that the philosophical en terprise may have come to an end, that philosophy may have exhausted itself . Philosophy is now in pursuit of a new identity.