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Abstract
The category of “development” (Entwicklung in German) is a good example of the transfer of biological time into historical time: it is a category borrowed from biology of the 18th century which, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, serves to conceive history as the development of a universal substrate ((a) people, humanity, the spirit of the world, etc.). After indicating some milestones in the history of the concept of development in Germany from the mid-17th to the late 18th century, I study this category in four German theories of history (Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx). The thesis that I will defend is that during the 19th century, the development category proved to be inadequate or incomplete for thinking the historical experience in its practical dimension, that is to say, as something that is effected partly by individuals.
Abstract
The category of “development” (Entwicklung in German) is a good example of the transfer of biological time into historical time: it is a category borrowed from biology of the 18th century which, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, serves to conceive history as the development of a universal substrate ((a) people, humanity, the spirit of the world, etc.). After indicating some milestones in the history of the concept of development in Germany from the mid-17th to the late 18th century, I study this category in four German theories of history (Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx). The thesis that I will defend is that during the 19th century, the development category proved to be inadequate or incomplete for thinking the historical experience in its practical dimension, that is to say, as something that is effected partly by individuals.
Abstract
This paper deals with the problem of the emergence of time in three different ways, at the intersection of the history of philosophy and the history of science: 1) the emergence of time with subjectivity examined on the basis of Kant’s idealism; 2) the emergence of time with life, considered in the light of the work of Bergson; 3) the emergence of time with the Universe, in relation to the notions of ‘The Big Bang’ and ‘The Planck Wall’. It concludes that the idea of the emergence of time is inconsistent in a diachronic sense, and problematic in a synchronic sense. One meaning could, however, be accorded to this notion: with life, a new relation to time has emerged and has attained one of its most developed forms with the human being.
Abstract
In this paper, I would like to show that Koselleck’s thesis on the dissolution of the topos historia magistra vitae in modernity is open to certain objections, to the extent that one finds in modernity a number of practical conceptions of history which are “useful for life”. My own thesis is that the topos of history as the “Guide to Life” is not so much dissolved as rather transformed with modernity, and in a sense which has to be specified. This point of view will be defended with reference to European authors of the nineteenth century (I focus on the examples of Droysen and Nietzsche), though I will add some observations on the twentieth century in the last part of the paper.