Paesaggi spengleriani fra discontinuità e alberi filogenetici

Alessandro Ottaviani

2023-01-01

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Abstract

The essay investigates Spengler’s relationship with the biological sciences and in particular with paleontology, which, in the two decades straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, played a significant role in the critique of the continuity that Darwin and Haeckel set as the foundation of natural history; the essay also highlights how the discontinuity option taken by Spengler Der Untergang des Abendlandes would prove less clear-cut; in the last and unpublished works Spengler recovers certain aspects of Haeckel’s phylogenetic doctrine, thus tracing a parabola that shows many traits in common with the one carried out in parallel by the exponents of the ethnological school of the Kulturkreislehere.