L'enjeu épistémologique de la notion d'époque entre organisme et système au XIXe siècle // [The epistemological importance of the notion of "epoch" between organism and system in the 19th century]

Abstract
The heuristic function of the notion of epoch seems to have survived the distrust for its ontological implications that was typical of the epistemic stance of historical research in the 19th century. A historical approach to this notion brings to light its role in the search for an epistemic framework for understanding the otherness of times past, since the emergence of a new perception of their discontinuity and uniqueness. Especially in the German tradition, the representation of epochs as intrinsically coherent wholes stemmed, in the 18th and 19th centuries, from a dialectic between two major metaphoric fields, the "system" and the "organism," revealing a positive interplay between philology, history, and the life sciences in the creation of the notion. J. G. Droysen's seminal nominalistic approach to the notion of epoch later entailed a shift to the prominence of process as a unifying framework for historical understanding.