Abstract

The author reconstructs the evolution of Droysen’s perspective on the object of historical knowledge, from the initial transcendentalism of the 1857 Grundriss der Historik to the 1882 redaction of the same text, where the historical object is defined in ontological terms. In 1857, under the influence of W. von Humboldt, Droysen inclined towards a methodological pluralism which justified different ways of knowledge depending on the perspective from which the object could be viewed. The ontological point of view emerges in two methodological writings of the Sixties and is fully achieved in the second redaction of the Historik, where, focusing on the concepts of nature and history, and strongly indebted to Hegel’s philosophy of history, Droysen singles out a different temporal structure between historical phenomena, with their individual diversity and openness to development, and natural phenomena, where the recurring element in which their movement resolve itself take them back again and again to the dimension of space