Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas

Unit-Ideas Unleashed: A Reinterpretation and Reassessment of Lovejovian Methodology in the History of Ideas

“…[Second,] [i]f there is good reason to insist that we can only study an idea by seeing the nature of all the occasions and activities -the language games -within which it might appear, then there must be correspondingly good reason to insist that the project of studying histories of 'ideas,' tout court, must rest on a fundamental philosophical mistake. 47 Skinner is only able to reach his two criticisms through conflation of 'idea' with 'word' or 'phrase'.48 This conflation is manifest in the passage on nobilitas, where he promises to consider 'the attempt to write the history of the idea of nobilitas in the Renaissance' but proceeds to show the two diffferent 'meaning[s] of the term'. 49 We can well agree that the history of a mere word (a certain combination of letters) should not be called the history of an idea, but it is quite a jump from there to the conclusion that histories of ideas are themselves intrinsically flawed.…”

“…47 Skinner is only able to reach his two criticisms through conflation of 'idea' with 'word' or 'phrase'.48 This conflation is manifest in the passage on nobilitas, where he promises to consider 'the attempt to write the history of the idea of nobilitas in the Renaissance' but proceeds to show the two diffferent 'meaning[s] of the term'. 49 We can well agree that the history of a mere word (a certain combination of letters) should not be called the history of an idea, but it is quite a jump from there to the conclusion that histories of ideas are themselves intrinsically flawed.…”

“…51 Lovejoy suggests several types of unit-idea: assumptions or 'unconscious mental habits', such as the Enlightenment preference for simple schemes of ideas; 'Dialectical motives', which are particular turns of reasoning such as the both philosophical and commonplace nominalist motive of reducing the general to its particulars; 'Metaphysical pathos', which is the tendency to arouse a congenial feeling in the audience, as when a thinker obscures or enters into the esoteric; and a specifijic proposition or principle and its corollaries.52 While these are not unit-ideas in my elemental sense, recognition of them is evidently inconsistent with a mere 'fetishism of words'. 53 On the contrary, focusing on them should help us to understand the authentic use of a word or phrase by uncovering the conceptual contexts in which they arose, the mental tics that fuelled them, and the emotional charge they held.54 Moreover, Lovejoy exhibits an acute sensitivity to diffferences of usage within the same context.55 For example, he distinguishes between various meanings of Christianity and Romanticism.56 He even goes so far as to list thirteen meanings of pragmatism and some sixty-six uses of 'nature' in antiquity.57 Indeed, 'Lovejovian' is sometimes used as shorthand for the very attention to detail that Skinner claims Lovejoy disregards. 58 So much, then, for the claim that Lovejoy merely studies occurrences of words.59 But is this criticism more applicable to my conception of elemental unit-ideas?…”

Geography and other disciplines: genealogy, anamnesis and the canon

“…Moreover, belief in the value of the canon had rested, he suggested, on a series of questionable pre-judgements 'about the defining characteristics of the discipline to which the writer is supposed to have contributed.' 1 In opposition to what he termed the 'mythology' of the canon, Skinner's counter-proposition was straightforward.Drawing inspiration from the historical method proposed by RG Collingwood and the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and JL Austin, he urged historians of political thought to focus on the meaning and use that texts had at the time they were written.Rather than read classic texts in terms of their relation to so-called 'canonical doctrines', Skinner argued that texts should be read in relation to the specific questions and problems with which their authors and readers were concerned. 2 In this light, the historian's dissatisfaction with what he took to be the then dominant approach to the interpretation of, for example, Descartes' Meditations 'stems from the fact that it leaves us without any sense of the specific question to which Descartes may have intended his doctrine of certainty as a solution.'…”

“…Moreover, belief in the value of the canon had rested, he suggested, on a series of questionable pre-judgements 'about the defining characteristics of the discipline to which the writer is supposed to have contributed.' 1 In opposition to what he termed the 'mythology' of the canon, Skinner's counter-proposition was straightforward.…”