The Logical Statute of Historical Sciences of Culture. Weber, Rickert and the "Early" Croce

Abstract

In the third section of the Roscher und Knies Weber discusses the theory of intuition exposed by Croce in the Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, doing this with a view to the problem of the logical foundation of the historical sciences. In this perspective, Weber ascribes a series of «naturalistic errors»  to Croce’s thesis of the “reduction” of history to the concept of art. These errors (notwithstanding an explicit reference to Husserl) are circumscribed and highlighted through logical and terminological means drawn from Rickert’s Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung. Nevertheless, in the great Weber’s methodological essays of the beginning of the 20^th century, the comparison with the “early” Croce does not stop here: in an important passage of the first part of the Kritische Studien, the Italian philosopher and his German disciple Karl Vossler are recalled as scholars who have the merit of having strongly highlighted that the «analysis of the value» is one of the two necessary poles of the Begriffsbildung of the historical cultural sciences, but at the same time the fault of having disregarded, in its autonomy, the other necessary side of such a polarity: that of «causal regression».