The New Historiography of Thought

Intellectual histories are on the way to becoming cultural histories. Their approach is changing and so is their object. They understand what has happened and they recount the past in a different way. They are no longer interested in the linear reconstruction of internal change within a discipline or a concept. More generally, they now seem to reject the notion of an autonomous order of abstraction and discursiveness. The new perspective might be summarized as follows: in order to understand what has been thought, one should immerse intellectual events into that relationship between the cognitive aspect of thought and the historical venture, which is precisely what we call culture. One should fasten reasonings and connect problems and speculations to their language ground. Not that this would be the ground level of course there are many other levels of determination. But the language ground connects them all, as long as we deal with intellectual events. Moreover, the language level not only connects but also acts in its own way, with its own dynamism and inertia. The thickness of language, its historical density, gives weight to verbal formulations and thereby strengthens them and itself becomes an active agent, which makes the verbal dimension truly the medium for discursiveness and not only its background. The new intellectual historiography would fully acknowledge the verbal medium. When it comes to understanding the past, this new approach is tantamount to a new dimension. Not an easy dimension to deal with, since it appears as fuzziness and confusion. When it comes to complexity, it is always easier to give it a status than to understand how it works. The verbal dimension in culture is where one finds

Archaeology · Historiography · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

• From romantic creativity to postmodern recycling; keys that show the end of western civilization

  Open Access•Amado Lascar•Journal of Historical Archaeology…•2018

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