Teoria dei valori e storia. La guerra mondiale di Wilhelm Windelband

Abstract

In my contribution, I aim to identify the role of war and conflict within Windelband’s philosophy of history. By examining the philosopher’s body of work, it will be shown how the War Lecture, published during the First World War – an event that posed a risk to the destruction of European civilization – is a manifestation of his theory of values in the light of the stress test of the war experience. The theory of values and the idea of history as a tool of philosophy, as a matrix in which cultural values are born, are tested in it. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel’s reflections on history and war constitute the fundamental theoretical baggage of Windelband’s conception. An analysis of the reworking and redefinition of their thought by him will allow us to delineate the specificity of his perspective and his political coloration in the context of Germany in the 1910s.