Intellectual History Research Paper

Intellectual history does not deal with all records of human thinking. The history of ideas has never been concerned with every idea crossing human minds. Rather, it has focused on philosophical ideas discussed by mostly well-known thinkers, primarily belonging to the Western tradition (such as Plato, Locke, and Marx), with occasional glances at non-European thinkers (such as Averroes and Maimonides). Its typical primary sources have been the ‘great texts’ of the European canon (from Homer and the Bible to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Mill’s On Liberty). In recent years, intellectual history has examined a far broader range of authors and texts, reading beyond the best-known thinkers, the ‘great books,’ and the European canon. But its subject matter—which keeps it apart from its neighbor disciplines, cultural history and literary studies—remains the written discussions of intellectual questions. It is interested in all records of sustained efforts to debate—within scholarly traditions—aspects of nature and human nature, knowledge and faith, society, and politics.

Historians of ideas identified several key issues that have been part of the literature of classical antiquity, Jewish and Christian thought, medieval and modern European writing: our understanding of the physical world, the applicability of its structure to human situations, faith and reason, morality and government. Broad themes (such as the role of God in the world), long-running ideas (such as ‘the great chain of being’), specific concepts (such as love, reason, justice, the good life) and particular terms (such as ‘libido,’ ‘alienation,’ ‘civil society’) all belong to the history of ideas. But historians of ideas, unlike philosophers, do not try to ‘explain’ these themes and concepts. Nor do they wish, like other social scientists, to ‘problematize’ them and use them as analytical tools. Instead, they examine how such ideas and terms were used, transformed, transmitted, abandoned, or rediscovered, over time and across cultures.

Such examination can pose questions of continuity and change, gradual or abrupt; it can compare cultures and languages that expressed related ideas or similar terms in different ways; and it can trace the transmission of ideas and concepts. In particular, historians have looked at the passage of ideas between three kinds of interlocutors:

(a) individual thinkers reading and responding to one another, either as contemporaries or across generations;

(b) social groups—such as churches and learned academies—dealing with ideas and transforming them; and

(c) broadly shared ways of approaching ideas—such as philosophical schools, cultural movements, and academic disciplines.

The first category has been the dominant one during most of the twentieth century. Significantly, recent attempts to question the traditional approaches of the history of ideas have often focused on the individual author and reader, suggesting that we may not know as much as we think we know about their minds, intentions, and use of words.

The term ‘intellectual history,’ running parallel to ‘history of ideas’ especially in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, denotes an attempt to depart from the limiting contours of an ‘idea,’ acknowledging that one may never be able to decide precisely what an ‘idea’ is. Intellectual history therefore moved on to analyzing texts, the uses of language, and the location of participants within the contours of intellectual discourse. It addresses the complexities of transmission, acknowledging that ‘ideas’ belong in texts and that texts have contexts. Inspired by neighboring disciplines, especially literary theory, intellectual history has been increasingly aware that ‘meaning’ and ‘understanding’ are neither self-evident, nor easy to trace, and can be affected by the historian’s own perspective.

New intellectual history has a broader view of the nature of intellectual activity: it is no longer only about traditional scholarly debate, not only about ‘great books’ by towering thinkers (what the German historian Friedrich Meinecke called ‘moving from mountaintop to mountaintop’). Intellectual history has broadened to include the writings of lesser-known, and even obscure, men and women. Its source material encompasses art and fiction, visual and musical ways of conveying ideas, misreception and subversion, emotions and conflicts. The intellectual historian’s primary sources can include paintings and private correspondence, musical notes and prayer books aphorisms and epitaphs, poems and cinema footage, landscape descriptions and web sites. The great philosophers have not been abandoned, but they are read in new ways and weighed against new evidence.

1. The Origins Of Intellectual History

The term ‘history of ideas’ first appeared in Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia philosophica de ideis published in Augsburg in 1723. It was taken up by Giambattista Vico who referred to his monumental New Science as—among other things—‘una storia delle umane idee’ (Kelley 1990). It was the eighteenth century, then, that marked off the history of ideas as a particular field of inquiry that differs from histories of other subjects. Eighteenth-century history of ideas also began to consider its subject matter from what the Enlightenment called a ‘ critical’ perspective. And yet, the Enlightenment did not invent intellectual history single-handed.

1.1 Parent Disciplines And Inspirations

Two centuries before Brucker and Vico, the humanist historiography of the Renaissance had reached out to encompass all aspects of human thought and endeavor and aimed at writing ‘the history of wisdom’ (historia sapientiae). Europe’s early modern universities developed historical accounts of their own disciplines, doctrines, and schools. The direct parent discipline of the history of ideas was the history of philosophy, which lent a particular philosophical and theological flavor to the historical accounts (Kelley 1990). Consequently, historians of ideas often asked not only the question ‘what ideas did past thinkers discuss,’ but also, ‘what is the meaning of ideas in history,’ and ‘how does the history of ideas evolved.’

Another important parent discipline was Renaissance rhetoric, which offered a linguistic analysis of the way human beings think and form their ideas. The humanist tradition of rhetoric was cast aside by major early modern philosophers, like Descartes and Leibniz who claimed to be able to describe the way things are, independent of how they are worded. But the rhetorical approach to ideas was to return, with a vengeance, in the future career of intellectual history.

1.2 Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century Histories Of Philosophy And Of The Human Spirit

Enlightenment histories of philosophy, learning, literature, and the arts, which formed the nascent history of ideas, departed from former doctrinal accounts by trying to find a general meaning for the development of thought and learning though the ages. Whether God remained in the picture (Lessing) or not (Voltaire, Kant, Condorce), these histories focused on the ‘progress of reason,’ or on ‘the history of human spirit’ (Kelley 1990). The former looked at great philosophers, while the latter followed the broader dispersion of ideas different cultures and historical phases. Both these approaches to the history of ideas offered a variety of evolutionary accounts, which reflected the Enlightenment’s fascination with the question of progress, the respective advantages of ancients and moderns, and models of history as a linear advance, as cyclical, or as prone to regressions.

This enlightenment fascination gave rise to two questions still haunting historians today: should intellectual history center on ‘great thinkers’ or on many minds? And in what sense does the history of ideas ‘progress’?

The question of progress opened up a new inquiry about Europe’s singularity. It led Enlightenment thinkers and their nineteenth-century heirs to create a new chronology for European history. This chronology was deeply affected by the history of ideas: Rome’s grandeur and decline were considered in terms of ideas, religious and political, affecting its fate (Montesquieu, Ferguson, Gibbon). The newly minted ‘middle ages’ were temporarily cast aside as an intellectually ‘dark’ era. And, in the hands of Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance became a focal point for an account of Europe’s intellectual and cultural renewal, its leap to a great future from the springboard of a rediscovered past.

But precisely the same questions led other scholars to look beyond Europe, seeking intellectual traditions in other parts of the world and juxtaposing them against the European narrative. Nineteenth-century scholarly concern with the Jewish scriptures, Chinese religion, Indian mythology, and Islamic philosophy was partly an outcome of the Enlightenment wrestling with questions of linearity in the history of ideas.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw history as a process of unfolding philosophical patterns, changing with the ‘spirit’ of the times and tied to the past in intelligible dialectic ways. Hegel also led the way to considering the history of the mind as categorically different from the physical world, inspiring the rise of the ‘human sciences’ (Geisteswissenschaften) in the nineteenth century. The controversial distinction between the physical and the human sciences still haunts scholars today. Intellectual historians are affected by it in their complex relationship with political history: in what sense does the ‘world out there’ intervene in the history of ideas? Can ideas and reality affect one another? Is their interplay an appropriate subject matter for the intellectual historian?

Another Enlightenment legacy, eclecticism, cast different light on questions of ideas and reality. Eclectics and ‘popular philosophers’ attempted to pick up the most interesting strands in the history of philosophy, and to compare, combine, and apply them in ways appropriate for the modern age. This approach took up the Enlightenment’s key concept of ‘criticism’ and purported to judge, select, and rearrange contents of earlier philosophical writings. Furthermore, eclectics (notably Victor Cousin) began to suggest that the history of ideas must look to ‘external’ causes, cultural and environmental. Karl Marx was to follow with a more assertive theory of the dependence of ideas on economic and social factors.

The nineteenth-century views of the role of ideas in history left several unresolved questions: ought intellectual historians approach their subject matter judgementally and selectively, as eclectics and ideological thinkers have done? Or should they—as nineteenth-century historicists and twentieth-century neo-historicists argued—immerse themselves in the inner logic of the texts and the era they are studying, suspend judgement and avoid any attempts to mobilize the past in service of the present?

The Enlightenment’s ‘critical’ approach to the history of ideas was especially interesting when it looked at language. Vico, Condillac, and Herder suggested that many alleged ‘truths’ of philosophy are anchored in the way thinkers use words. While philosophers like Descartes and Kant claimed to be able to grasp metaphysical truth, either about the world or about human reason, a more historical perspective disclosed that language is an unavoidable and problem-ridden medium of all human thought. Language affects individual thinkers by drawing up the conceptual lines available to their culture and era. Thus, as Christian Garve suggested in 1772, eighteenth-century Englishmen may create a political philosophy based on the concept of ‘public spirit,’ but their German contemporaries can not; the linguistic and conceptual apparatus is (still) missing.

The question whether language necessarily delimits thought, or may in turn be expanded by thought, is still open. Garve’s claim that his German contemporaries could not understand ‘public spirit’ found an echo in the twentieth-century work of Hans Georg Gadamet about the ‘horizons’ of cultures and languages. These horizons change and fuse, but they represent a finite range of possibilities available to any thinker at a given place and time.

And yet, thinkers have always played with language and fought against its conventions. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, was not content with the prevalent distinction between ‘male virtue’ (political) and ‘female virtue’ (matrimonial). She chose to push the concepts around rather than succumb to her era’s linguistic horizons. By applying civic virtue to women, she accomplished a theoretical breakthrough (and heralded a social one). Thus, as recent intellectual historians have suggested, language interacts with thought in more ways than one.

2. Twentieth-Century History Of Ideas

The emergence of the new history of ideas in the early twentieth century involved a conscious self-distancing from philosophy, the use of source criticism and analytical methods developed by modern historians from Ranke to the Annales school, and new sensitivity to the scope and limits of its subject matter. During the second half of the twentieth century, the history of ideas became subject to the same transformations that affected historical studies as a whole; and, due to its textual focus, it has been especially prone to critique and innovation inspired by literary theory and by postmodernist thought.

2.1 Three Founders

In the American context, Arthur O. Lovejoy is often seen as the founding father of twentieth-century history of ideas, a discipline closely identified with the books he wrote and the journal he edited. There were several other seminal scholars, of whom two were chosen here for representing broad European vistas and unique philosophical perspectives: the German-American Ernst Cassirer and the Russian-British Isaiah Berlin.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy wished to consolidate the history of ideas and pare off a host of other ‘histories’ that had become entangled with it. The crux, he suggested, was the study of specific ideas, ‘unit-ideas,’ in their historical evolving. The most famous example for this approach was Lovejoy’s own perusal of the history of one ‘unit-idea,’ the idea of the great chain of being. Lovejoy offered a historical account of the ‘principle of plenitude,’ starting with the early Greek notion that all possibilities would eventually be realized, and tracing the trajectory of this idea up to the modern era (Lovejoy 1936). He went on to discuss the histories of such general ideas as Romanticism, primitivism, and evolutionism.

The transformation of ideas over time was for Lovejoy by no means a linear ascent, nor ‘an exclusively logical progress in which objective truth progressively unfolds itself in a rational order.’ In contrast to linear progressivists, Lovejoy envisaged a perpetual historical ‘oscillation’ between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism (Kelley 1990). Lovejoy’s legacy, especially the Journal of the History of Ideas he founded and edited, has affected many American historians. Recent criticism of his approach centres on the primacy of Reason in his work and on the difficulty of clarifying his notion of ‘unit-ideas’ as independent historical factors.

Like Lovejoy, Ernst Cassirer was a philosopher as well as a historian. Cassirer understood the rise of modern culture in terms of ‘symbolic forms,’ ways of cultural expressions that gradually acquired autonomous standing, including language, religion, art, and myth. As his seminal work on the Enlightenment (Cassirer 1932) shows, Cassirer’s view of the history of ideas was evolutionist, but not rationalist. In the crucial era of the Enlightenment, he suggested, fields of inquiry gradually liberated themselves from the powerful matrix of natural science, creating a modern web of truth-quests leading to Goethe’s literature and to Kant’s philosophy. Subsequently, in the era of Romanticism, the prevalent focus on Reason transformed itself into a subtler aesthetic concept of the human search for truth.

Cassirer’s work has been criticized for reasons similar to critiques of Lovejoy: he did not care to look beyond ‘great thinkers,’ his work centered on male European philosophers, and his progressivist master narrative was no longer convincing to late twentieth-century historians. Cassirer, a refugee from Nazi Germany, shared Lovejoy’s faith in liberal and rational responses to political evil; late twentieth-century historians did not feel his urge to reflect this moral imperative in scholarly work. On the other hand, Cassirer’s approach to the history of ideas helped to broaden its horizons by seriously considering artistic imagination and religious faith as prime sources for the history of ideas, parallel but not reducible to scholarly writings.

Isaiah Berlin, who was reluctant to define himself as a historian, is one of the writers most closely associated with the history of ideas outside the American scholarly tradition. Berlin was deeply engaged with the relationships between ideas and reality. He was convinced that thinkers, especially modern European thinkers, have been able to affect leaders, revolutionaries, and hence the personal fate of millions, for better and for worse.

Berlin’s works on Karl Marx, on the ‘Counter-Enlightenment,’ on English liberalism, and on the Russian intelligentsia convey two fundamental beliefs about the history of ideas. First, Berlin agreed with his protagonists Vico and Herder that the historian can enter the mind and reasoning of past writers, ‘feel’ them from within and represent their thoughts faithfully and (in Berlin’s case) intensely. Second, Berlin’s writing implied that the history of ideas is adjacent to political engagement with ideas. Berlin found two traces running underground in the history of modern European thought: one associated with ‘negative liberty,’ associated with individual freedom from official intervention; and another associated with ‘positive liberty,’ a range of yearnings for communal self-fulfilment and meta-individual quests for the good life (Berlin 1958). Similarly, Berlin identified two kinds of thinkers: the ‘fox’ who is capable of exploring multiple ideas and possibilities, and the ‘hedgehog’ who creates a monolithic theory based on one type of explanation or one great idea. Berlin’s history of ideas was closely associated with his own preference for negative liberty and for thinkers defined as ‘foxes’ (Montesquieu, Tolstoy, Mill), while exploring with great empathy the arguments for positive liberty and the thinkers who were essentially ‘hedgehogs’ (Rousseau, Dostoyevsky, Marx).

Criticism of Berlin has often focused on his broader-than-academic description of past writers, and on the idiosyncrasy of his style. Along with his aversion to monolithic explanations, these factors prevented Berlin from creating a historical ‘school’ of his own. In the last decade of the twentieth century, however, Berlin’s work has been taken up by historians of ideas who wish to explore their relationship with political philosophy. Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty has been taken up by historians, notably Quentin Skinner, as a reference point for redefining the scope of the history of ideas.

2.2 New Approaches And Problem-Setting In The Late Twentieth Century

From the early 1970s intellectual history has evolved in several directions. Interestingly, the new approaches often display ‘national’ schools of historical writing, banking and disparate scholarly traditions. In addition, they have been informed by innovations in cultural, linguistic, and literary studies.

2.2.1 American Developments And Critiques Of Lovejoy’s Legacy. In the United States, Lovejoy’s legacy has been developed by many disciples and colleagues associated with The Journal of the History of Ideas, founded by him in 1940. A great deal of the work has followed in Lovejoy’s footsteps, looking at the historical development of themes (no longer necessarily called ‘unit ideas’), mainly in European history. Even while abandoning Lovejoy’s dualistic, liberal meta-history, the tradition he founded carried on what may be termed a positivist outlook on the history of ideas.

Two important new dimensions were offered by Dominick LaCapra and Hayden White, both of whom have attempted to apply methods derived from literary studies to intellectual history. According to LaCapra, intellectual history ought to benefit from the broader connections made by literary criticism between texts and the contexts of their writing and reading. Literary texts should be taken up as legitimate sources, and the mental environment of authors, both literary and scholarly, should be perused more carefully (LaCapra 1983).

According to Hayden White, structuralism can be applied to intellectual history by taking up the common denominators of realistic and fictional narratives. Texts shed light on their original ‘mental climate’ whether they are documents or stories, starkly descriptive or ideologically biased (White 1987).

Both LaCapra and White thus expanded both the source pool and the analytical tools of Lovejoy’s tradition by appealing to literature as subject matter, historical witness and methodological pointer. Criticism of the structuralist and poststructuralist attempt to collapse the lines between literary and scholarly (or documentary) texts have focused on questions of genre, intention, evidence, and judgement: are novels really akin to philosophical tracts under the historian’s gaze? Is intellectual history enriched or impoverished by identifying historical narratives with fictional ones? Are all authors equally reliable, or unreliable? Are all ‘stories’ equally meaningful? Are traditions irrelevant? Is ‘historical truth’ obsolete?

2.2.2 The British–American School Of Linguistic Contextualism. The contextualist school, also known as the ‘Cambridge school,’ has maintained the traditional focus on scholarly and philosophical texts, while introducing a novel emphasis on language into the history of political and social thought.

This emphasis was in some sense heralded by the Welsh historian Raymond Williams, who held that in modern European history many important concepts—‘keywords’—have undergone ‘conscious changes, consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer’ (Williams 1985). William’s pioneering interest in the social evolution of words was, however, overtaken by a broader linguistic approach inspired by discourse theory.

Linguistic contextualism was framed by the works of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. While specializing in early modern Western Europe, its insights can be applicable to other periods and topics of intellectual history. Pocock and Skinner have carried ‘context’ beyond its traditional social, political, and economic matrices by looking at textual contexts: Sources should not be studied solely on the merits of their own contents, nor just vis-a-vis other ‘great works’ along the mountain-chain of traditional history of ideas. The most important context is an author’s immediate textual environment. A perusal of many contemporaneous writings, often minor or obscure, will yield a sense of a ‘political language,’ or what Pocock called a ‘paradigm.’ Pocock found several early modern paradigms, primarily in English and British history: the languages of the ‘ancient constitution,’ natural law, classical republicanism, politeness and civility (Pocock 1985). Many authors used more than one ‘language’; Montesquieu, for example, combined natural law and classical republican elements. When the coexistence and interplay of such discourses is recognized, an author’s conformity, originality and polemics are better understood. Hence the importance of minor figures for shedding new light of the major protagonists of the history of ideas. Thus, John Locke can be examined more closely as responding to his near-contemporary Robert Filmer rather than seen merely as a long-distance interlocutor of Thomas Hobbes on the one side and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the other.

Skinner placed particular emphasis on the intentions of authors. It is precisely the understanding of contemporary textual context that allows us to identify the use an author makes when choosing particular words. Conventions can be taken up or subverted, shared vocabulary can be accepted, or expanded, or abandoned. But such intentional discursive play, with its subtle layers of allusion, criticism, and irony, can only be unearthed if the language of numerous and variegated contemporaneous texts is studied closely.

Criticism against linguistic contextualism has taken several directions. One direction is that of critical conceptual history, discussed below. From the vantage point of literary studies, Dominick LaCapra has argued that linguistic contextualism over-emphasizes ‘documents’ at the expense of literature, depriving poetry and fiction of their legitimacy as evidencegivers and of their status as viable primary sources in the history of ideas.

2.2.3 The German School Of Begriffsgeschichte (History Of Concepts). Led by Reinhard Koselleck, the multi-volume project of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (‘basic historical concepts,’ Brunner et al. 1972–92) analyzes the historical semantics of key political and social concepts in German and other European languages during the ‘saddle era’ of modernization, 1750–1850. Like the Cambridge School, the Begriffsgeschichte attitude requires close contextual examination of primary sources. Authors are seen as working within a conceptual environment, where the major terms are continuously used but their meaning evolves and transforms through intellectual, social, and political changes. Thus, terms such as ‘history,’ ‘civil society,’ and ‘revolution’ acquire new ranges of significance as they move from their Greek or Latin beginnings, via medieval applications, to early modern times. The most crucial transformation, however, took in the decades immediately preceding and following the French Revolution.

Begriffsgeschichte was thus more committed to a strict periodization of turning points in history of ideas than its British and American counterparts. It also remained closer to political chronology. The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe project was intended by Koselleck as a bridge between social history and the history of ideas. It thus maintained a commitment to social, political, and economic contexts alongside the purely linguistic approach.

Furthermore, the Begriffsgeschichte focus on concepts—understood as terms, sometimes accompanied by a derivative or a synonym—conveys a more formal understanding of the unit of analysis than either Lovejoy’s ‘unit-ideas’ or Pocock’s and Skinner’s notions of ‘political language.’ The adherence to concepts has been criticized for its inflexibility; yet it also allows historians to fine-tune their understanding of conceptual distinctions, shifts of meaning, deliberate changes, neologisms and disagreements about proper usage of concepts (Richter 1990). English-speaking proponents of ‘critical conceptual history’ have used Begriffsgeschichte as a corrective to the overarching generalizations of discourse theory (Ball 1988).

2.2.4 French–American Approaches To Intellectual History. The intellectual history of France, centered on the French Revolution, its origins, and aftermath, has developed along lines different from the British, American, and German ones. From Daniel Mornet’s Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (1933) to the late twentieth-century work of Roger Chartier and the American historians Robert Darnton and Keith Michael Baker, French history of ideas has been less associated with isolating ‘unit-ideas,’ still lies with political discourse. Partly due to the powerful impact of the Annales school, it has been strongly tied with social and cultural history (Chartier 1982).

Consequently, intellectual history of France often appears in overlap with cultural history, especially where the history of reading, and of the book as an artefact, is concerned. From this perspective, Darnton (1980, p. 337) suggested that intellectual history includes ‘the history of ideas (the study of systematic thought usually in philosophical formulations), intellectual history proper (the study of informal thought, climates of opinion and literary movements), the social history of ideas (the study of ideologies and idea diffusion), and cultural history (the study of culture in the anthropological sense, including world- views and collective mentalites).’

3. Major Issues, Controversies, Disciplinary Overlaps

Intriguingly, almost all major issues and controversies associated with intellectual history during the last third of the twentieth century were associated with its intersections with neighboring disciplines.

Social history represents claims to expand the new contextualism by placing authors and readers, as well as books, within broader social contours. (Hughes 1988). The Begriffsgeschichte school, in particular, attempted a social–historical approach to the history of ideas.

Cultural history poses a wide range of problems for intellectual historians, ranging from accusation of narrowness and elitism to suggestions for expanding the range of inspected authors and texts and moving beyond the written word or the individual thinker (Blake 1996).

The intellectual history of women has recently attracted growing attention. Key questions here relate to the past neglect of women thinkers, the effect of gender on the contents of thinkers’ ideas and the effect of political thought on women’s status and image (Kerber 1997).

The history of science, traditionally part of intellectual history, is recently posing a new set of challenges associated with novel issues such as ecology, genetics, gender differences, and animal experimentation. More fundamentally, the history of science highlights the quest for scientific truth, which provides a context for recent debates about the cultural dependency of historical truth.

Linguistics and literary theory—especially semiology, reception theory, discourse theory, structuralism, and deconstruction—have deeply affected intellectual history. They have opened up questions, as seen above, on the nature of its primary sources, their legibility and reliability, the status of writers and readers and the accessibility (or even the very relevance) of their intentions and thought processes.

Finally, philosophy, the mother discipline of the history of ideas, is still its close accomplice. Lovejoy, Cassirer and Berlin (as well as Alasdair MacIntyre and Quentin Skinner) have all pursued the history of ideas as part of a philosophical work. Richard Rorty saw intellectual history as describing ‘what the intellectuals were up to at a given time’ and ‘their interaction with the rest of society,’ therefore exempt from worries about defining philosophy and philosophers, and hence particularly helpful to philosophers in revising their own canon afresh (Rorty 1984).

Rorty’s definition—seeing the philosopher as one consumer of intellectual history—incidentally raises one of its most perennial issues: whose intellect, which ideas, belong to (what) history of ideas?

4. New Directions And Future Agendas

Intellectual history is currently responding to external critiques of its narrow, selective traditional subject matter by expanding its temporal and geographical horizons in several ways. In the wake of new interest in women’s intellectual history and in minor writers, it is also looking at previously marginalized European cultures and at the non-European world.

Women’s intellectual history suggests that women thinkers could be analyzed in different ways than their male counterparts. It is yet unclear whether the history of non-European ideas might similarly transform itself into a non-European history of ideas, raising new conceptual approaches on top of new source materials. However, the question whether gender or ethnic groups require an intellectual history ‘of one’s own’ remains open and is hotly debated.

Historical semantics, which has faced various critical attacks, are being partly rejuvenated by computer based corpuses and methods of research. Linguistic conceptualism is expanding beyond its Anglophone lair, meeting up with Begriffsgeschichte and becoming interested in other (real) languages, political discourses, and questions of reception and interaction. Social and cultural contexts of the production of texts are gaining ever more attention. And clearly, perhaps due to the new attention to female, noncanonical, and non-European thinkers, it appears that the Author, along with her or his opinions and intentions and beliefs, is far from dead.

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