Intellectual history as a tool of philosophy

Victorino Tejera

pp. 122-134

in: T. Z. Lavine, Victorino Tejera (eds), History and anti-history in philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

Because every historical account of anything is also a reflection upon it, every history is in a sense intellectual. Intellectual history proper is so in the further sense that it takes for its subject-matter the expressive and reflective products, processes and institutions of a society through intervals of time. These include the arts, the sciences, the political thought, the eschatological and everyday beliefs that are constitutive of the culture of the society as a civilization, namely, as a society with a certain quality to its survival. Eschatological and folk beliefs, though not always reflectively held, must be a concern of the intellectual historian because they are, along with other traditionary and created products, components of the climate of opinion of a society at given times. The intellectual historian cannot neglect the less reflective or apparently non-reflective products of a civilization without depriving himself of the contextualizing elements and dimension that make him more than a specialized historian of art or science, or a specialized political or religious historian.