Burckhardt, Nietzsche und die Kritik der wissenschaftlichen Methode

Abstract The contribution reframes Burckhardt and Nietzsche’s problematisation of scientific methodologies in the study of the humanities as an act of broader cultural critique. By contextualising this problematisation in their respective relationships with their scholarly mentors, and thus by highlighting the heterodoxy of their contribution to the academic endeavour, the article identifies this very heterodoxy as Burckhardt and Nietzsche’s most tangible contribution to critical theory. The analysis focuses on a few pivotal questions of methods, evincing two postures that were all but conservative, and that cannot but disprove the nowadays canonical portrait of two conservative thinkers. The main hypothesis is that the ultimate difference between their analogous disdain for positivistic trends resides in the different extent to which they could turn these postures into real life choices, reflecting in turn a different ability to forestall questions that were to arise in the following century.