Specialist in generality. Felix Kaufmann e l’interpretazione empiristico-critica della metodologia weberiana

The first paragraph of the essay examines Kaufmann’s definition of method- ology, in the belief that it is useful to understand how Weberian Wissenschaftslehre could be interpreted in the first decades of the last century, close to the publication in 1922 of the Gesammelte Aufsätze and straddling Schelting’s two pioneering con- tributions of 1922 and 1934 respectively. In the second section, I will instead devote myself to the way Kaufmann elaborates the ideal-typical language using certain terminological and conceptual resources taken from Schlick and Carnap, such as the notions of coordination and those of characteristic and marking, not least because it was precisely thanks to the refunctionalisation, so to speak Weberian, of these notions in their application to the problem of understanding the Fremdpsychische that Kaufmann was able to raise convincing objections to the physicalist behaviourism of some Viennese. Finally, in the third section, I will examine the formation of the specific causal language used by Kaufmann in his theory of action and the relevance in it of ceteris paribus clauses and formulations using hypothetical periods of impos- sibility, i.e. counterfactual propositions, especially to explain causality resulting from abstaining from an action.