Chapter 4 focuses on the German tradition of conceptual history and its philosophical foundations. As it shows, both theories, the Cambridge school’s and the German conceptual history’s, must be placed within the frameworks of the break of the evolutionist-teleological views of history at the end of the nineteenth century. It paved the way to the emergence of a new idea of temporality articulated around the idea of the radical contingency of historical processes. In turn, it provided the basis for an opposition between “natural sciences” and “cultural sciences,” emphasizing the centrality of subjective intentionality in the latter. The philosophical expression of this conceptual turn was Neo-Kantian historicism, whose best representative is Wilhelm Dilthey and his project of a “critique of historical reason.” The premise for it is the assumption of the meaningful character of social actions, which entailed another way of breaking the opposition between “ideas” and “reality,” different from that of the Cambridge school.

The concluding chapter contextualizes the study of ancient Doric architecture against the backdrop of European colonialism and modern globalization. The evolutionary explanation of the Doric temple can be seen as part of a broader tendency in the West of naturalizing and normalizing Greek/Western culture as world culture by tracing it back to universal principles. The critique of the evolutionary narrative makes it possible to appreciate the disruptive and innovative character of the Doric order as part of a historical shift in the wielding of religious and political power and in the relation between Greek communities and the landscapes they inhabited. Population growth, social change, and political innovation led to urbanization, colonization, and land reclamation on an unprecedented scale. These processes challenged the traditional religious system, which was based on an intrinsic relation between the divinities and the natural features of the landscape. The Doric temple can be seen as a response to this situation: by redefining the sacred space, “inhabited” by the gods, it also redefined what was outside the sacred precinct, the “profane” land that was subject to new forms of exploitation, land distribution, and colonization.