La lezione di Simmel. I problemi della filosofia della storia [1905-07] e il giovane Lukács

From 1905 to 1910, in the more incisive period of his influence on Lukács, Simmel was in the crucial phase of his transition from sociology to metaphysics, he was trying to achieve extending the principles of Kant criticism to the knowledge of historic phenomena. He was heading toward an empirical foundation of the apriori, avoiding both the historical relativism and the ingenuous realism, and in this «attempt» – as was defined by he himself – his research intersect the psychological and philosophic problems of the theory of objects and of the Gestaltheorie. A study of the text of the Problems of the philosophy of history (with a comparison of the changes of the 1905 and 1907 editions), expanded to that of some central methodological topics of Fundamental problems of philosophy enables to unearth the Simmel’s complex route and to identify in the concept of form of the personality – described as its rhythm – one of the soustaining pillars of the first Lukács great works, History of the development of modern drama and Soul and Form