Les formes et l'histoire: influences aristotéliciennes chez Droysen

In J.G. Droysen (1808-1884), the prominent German historian and theorist of historical method as well as educated philologist, the influence of Aristotle's thought is overtly pervasive. A more careful assessment of the role played by the reference to Aristotle in the framework of his work is however needed. The paper investigates this role by means of three central issues: the role of experience, the causal structure of historical world, and the connection of a hylemorphistic ontology to the representation of historical time with the aristotelic notion of "epidosis eis auto".