Anticipations of Hans Georg Gadamer’s Epistemology of History in Benedetto Croce’s Philosophy of History.docVIP

Open Journal of Philosophy 2013. Vol.3, No.2, 273-277 Published Online May 2013 in SciRes (/journal/ojpp) /10.4236/ojpp.2013.32043 Anticipations of Hans Georg Gadamer’s Epistemology of History in Benedetto Croce’s Philosophy of History Cody Franchetti Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York, USA Email: history@ Received January 3 , 2013; revised February 5 , 2013; accepted February 18 , 2013 rd th th Copyright ? 2013 Cody Franchetti. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons At- tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In Truth and Method Hans Georg Gadamer revealed hermeneutics as one of the foundational epistemo- logical elements of history, in contrast to scientific method, which, with empiricism, constitutes natural sciences’ epistemology. This important step solved a number of long-standing arguments over the ontol- ogy of history, which had become increasingly bitter in the twentieth century. But perhaps Gadamer’s most important contribution was that he annulled history’s supposed inferiority to the natural sciences by showing that the knowledge it offers, though different in nature from science, is of equal import. By showing history’s arrant independence from the natural sciences, the former was furnished with a new- found importance, and thrust on an equal footing with the latter—even in a distinctly scientific age such as ours. This essay intends to show that the idea of history’s discrete ontology from science was prefig- ured almost a century earlier by Benedetto Croce. Croce and Gadamer show compelling points of contact in their philosophies, notwithstanding that they did not confer equal consequen