Primum in orbe deos fecit tempus? Una nota sulla storiografia e i regimi di storicità nella filosofia dei Lumi

In this paper, I discuss how philosophical historiography has addressed the issue of Enlightenment temporal conception, starting from Ernst Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. Steering clear of both the classical and simplistic view of eighteenth-century historical optimism, which glorifies the progressive capacities of reason, and its opposite but symmetrical counterpart, the pessimism of the Enlightenment, I consider the ways in which two recent historiographical contributions by Bertrand Binoche and Giovanni Paoletti allow to rearticulate the problem in its entirety against the backdrop of Koselleck’s studies. Starting from the categories of historicity – that is, the ways in which the relationships between past, present, and future are reconnected – and of the passions of time – the collective and individual experience in the face of time as a whole – I reconstruct the trajectories and methodological problems open in current reflection on eighteenth-century philosophical histories.