Scienza e tempo alle origini dello storicismo tedesco

In the XVIII Century, in which the ground is set for the separation between natural and human sciences, an intensive search for a scientific method viable for historical objects is widespread in the whole field of humanities, the more so as it is endowed with the task to master the clear-cut break between past and present highlighted by the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. The notion of "epoch", grounded on a discontinuous representation of historical time, plays a crucial epistemological function in the crossroad between philosophy of history, historiography and philology, and reveals the strong power of attraction exterted by the notions of system and organism in the interplay between human sciences and contemporary life sciences. In the course of the XIX Century, the methodical synthesis between synchrony and diachrony purported by the Göttingen School, is subsided by an increasing tension between "epoch" and "process"; this tension characterizes, in the origin of the early German historicism, the different approaches of L. von Ranke and J.G. Droysen.