Il punto, la retta, il circolo. Note su «sistema» ed «enciclopedia» tra Kant e Hegel

This paper briefly explores and compares Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas of a “philosophical ncyclopedia”, in their essential connection with the systematic organization of knowledge and the final purposes of human reason. After a short exposition of some main philosophical meanings historically assumed by the term “system”, the text focuses on a selection of qualifying themes informing the Vorlesungen über die philosophische Enzyklopädie held by Kant in Königsberg while he was preparing his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s draft of a philosophical encyclopedia (indeed a promised, but never really fulfilled task) is then compared with Hegel’s idea animating the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (published for the first time in Heidelberg in 1817). The effective realisation of an “encyclopedia” depends on the different attitude allowed by dialectical thinking in facing the traditional question concerning the relationship between the systematic structure of reason and its virtually infinite historical contents.