Essays in the history of ideas.pdf

Johns Hopkins Press | 1948 | Pdf | Eng | 359 pages | 68.1 MB
by Arthur O. Lovejoy

Published for the History of Ideas Club of the Johns Hopkins University

Though he certainly had some kinds of precursors, the American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy was the founder of the academic study of the history of ideas, and in Essays in the History of Ideas (1948) were collected many of the shorter texts in which his vision of the field was concretely, if partially, exemplified. In the first essay of the collection - "The Historiography of Ideas" - he explains the necessity and principles of such a study. It differs from other kinds of intellectual history above all in that it is not to be limited by a specific academic discipline. That intellectual histories/overviews are often biased and so incomplete as to be completely misrepresentative is well known,(*) but even without such faults they also are typically limited to a single discipline: the track of the idea under study through the rest of human thought and action is completely ignored. Lovejoy's vision was to follow single ideas without concern for discipline and then to describe their interactions, antagonisms and syntheses. This clearly requires that the historian of ideas either be a jack of all intellectual trades or team up with experts in other fields (this Lovejoy did in some of his works).