La metodologia storiografica della scuola di Cambridge. Quentin Skinner e il culto del fatto

This essay shows some of the most important methodological and philosophical statements written by Quentin Skinner about the practice of history and the cult of the fact. Essentially, with many other historians Skinner has criticized the existence of a world of indisputable facts to be acquired. Within post-empiricist critique, He tries to reconsider the belief of many traditional historians about the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing what the evidence has to say. This approach is considered untenable. Instead, the methodological view that Skinner has followed reflect the acceptance of the semantic holism of the philosophies of the later Wittgenstein, Quine and Austin. Accordingly, He has tried to place the texts within their intellectual contexts to clarify what their authors were “doing” by writing them, distinguished two different dimensions of language: the dimension of meaning and the dimension of linguistic action.