Il concetto di sviluppo tra biologia e storia

The new, epigenetic notion of development marks a crucial historical shift in the late XVIII Century life sciences. Moving from the analysis by Reinhardt Koselleck of the temporalisation of historical time, the paper discusses the breaktrough of the notion of development in German Historicism as a critique and overcoming of the preformistic assumptions of the Enlightenment notion of progress. In this perspective, the temporalisation of historical time would not imply, as stressed by Koselleck, a denaturalization of history, but rather reveal the close interaction between a new conception of nature and of mankind.