Abstract

The aim of this article is that of examining the differences and the analogies between Michel Foucault's and Reinhart Koselleck's way of conceiving the genesis of the Enlightened Criticism as a reaction to the absolute State. The article is focused both on the points of contact between Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte and Foucault's archeologie du savoir, and on their common attention to the «zone of exchange» between concepts and language, on one side, and social-political reality, on the other side. The genesis of the «Philosophy of History» is conceived as a result of the Enlightened Criticism of absolutistic present: to the «Ontology of the Actuality» of the Criticism, it will follow the «Ontology of the Future» of the Philosophy of History.