THE CONTEXTUALIST REVOLUTION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

For many decades the methodology of “Rational Reconstruction”, which was also labeled as the appropriation-ism or presentism, dominates the Early modern philosophy scholarship. In the core of the methodology was the claims that one can read the Early Modern thinkers as 'colleagues' to the Modern Philosophy and the “Whig” interpretation of relation between the Early modern science and philosophy. Recently, the Early modern philoso-phy scholarship witnesses the methodological transformation that Ch. Mercer proposed to term as the “Contextu-alist Revolution”. In my paper I briefly contours the “Rational Reconstruction” methodology. Then I discuss the main claims of the Contextualist methodology and describe the innovative revisions results that it introduced brought in the Early modern scholarship.