Editorial: The Philosophy of Intellectual History and Conceptual Change

Abstract

Intellectual history, understood as the study of thinkers, ideas and thinking patterns in history, is probably the most interdisciplinary form of history writing that there is. An intellectual historian must be able to comprehend and study a great number of disciplines and contexts, even if one is not necessarily committed to the existence of unit ideas that traverse from context to context. However, because of its broad scope, intellectual history can sometimes seem shapeless and borderless. Interdisciplinarity and elusive boundaries would not be a problem if the basic intellectual unit(s) of intellectual history were explicit and the method by which to study them precise. Clarity regarding the basic unit of analysis and method of study would bring rigour and coherence to its practice. The intellectual historian would be able to stick to her disciplinary commitments and delineate the existence and the functions of these units in other disciplines and contexts from this specific methodological vantage point. It is thus unsurprising that there has been a productive debate about what these basic intellectual units should be and how intellectual history should be studied at large. It has been asked whether these units to be studied are concepts, ideas, some other larger thought complexes, sentences, other linguistic entities or something else entirely. And if they are, say, concepts, should they be conceived of as Platonic, linguistic, mental or some other kinds of entities? Further questions include the following: What defines when a concept is the same and when it is different? How much change is allowed for two conceptual instantiations of the ‘same’ intellectual unit in a historical trajectory? And so on. Naturally, there have also been powerful and insightful expressions of what the study of intellectual history consists in. Arguably one of the most famous is Arthur Lovejoy’s project of unit ideas.1 According to it, unit ideas can be identified in their basic form and in combinations in innumerable frameworks.