The Historical Method: From Genesis to Revival (From the Civil Science to the Modal Rhetoric)

Abstract

This study deals with two strategies of approaching the early modern epistemology of Gesteswissenschaften, the first of which sees in them the anticipation of historicism in the 19th – early 20th centuries, and the second — a precedent for turn to rhetoric and contingency, similar to the rhetorical turn in some areas of the theory of humanities in the mid-20th century. The starting point of the study is Benedetto Croce's view of the philosophy of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) as a prelude to romanticism (“the nineteenth century in nuce”; “il romanticismo fu vichiano”): Croce's conception is considered as a representative sample of the presentist appropriation of the Baroque civil science. This concept is contrasted with the theoretical historiography of the early modern times, which seeks in the “sciences of contingency” a resource of the renewal of the topical theory of humanities: a special emphasis is placed on Nancy S. Struever's modal rhetoric. It is demonstrated that this latter strategy contributed to free the philosophy of the Neapolitan thinker from anachronistic readings in the vein of romanticism and to replace it in its own time.