Abstract

In the second part of the Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik Max Weber faces the specific problem of the effective possibility for the historian, who is placed in front of doubts and disputes, to demonstratively justify the causal incidence of a certain event on events which are historically significant. In view of this logic reflection, Weber does not detect a valid help in the researches of the «historians» or of the «methodologists of history», but in those of the «representatives of very unrelated disciplines», and, primarily, in the concepts of «objective possibility» and «adequate causation» worked out by the physiologist and theoretician of probability Johannes von Kries . whose ideas Weber expressly confesses to have «plundered» [geplündert] and, at the same time, simplified . as well as in the reception of such concepts in the sphere of criminal law and of other fields of right. For this reason the essay suggests an analytical reassessment of the complex model of causal imputation worked out by Kries in his 1888 work Ueber den Begriff der objectiven Möglichkeit und einige Anwendungen desselben, starting from the assumption that it is a preliminary step, essential for anyone who wants to reliably determine how Weber separates the model at issue from its original breeding ground, and how he adapts it to his own specific problems about contents and method. In other words, the aim of this work is not so much that of directly focusing the manner in which Weber .plunder. Kries. ideas adapting them to his fundamental problems, but rather that of facing the matter in an incidental and indirect way , starting from what is still wanting, that is to say, from a close examination of the ideas of Kries which are "plundered" by Weber