Historians of Philosophy in the Situation of Hypertext

Abstract

This paper turns to contemporary discussions on the methodology in the history of philosophy and their general context of the humanities. A comparative analysis of the epistemological stances of the history of ideas (using the works by A.O. Lovejoy and I. Berlin, as well as H. Bloom’s studies on the Western canon) and conceptual history (from the pioneer in this area G. Teichmüller to R. Koselleck, Q. Skinner and J. Pocock) allows us to identify the peculiarities of both approaches as well as to reveal any points of converging and differences between them. Moreover, the article dwells on the main consequences of their use by the historians of philosophy as independent areas of research, such as cultural anthropology, study of literature, and linguistics. In addition, the paper discusses the canonization of forms of thinking as an efficient way of making a person identify him/her with a certain “imaginary community”, which simultaneously determines the subject’s way of thinking and is supported by him/her. The analysis performed allows us to infer the following: inquiries of historians of philosophy support the elaboration of paradigms and ideological forms of their representation; their methodological success consists in a specific character of their heuristic strategies that enables them to deal with the genuine genealogy of the present, in which contemporaneity finds its foundations. Thus, historians of philosophy are faced with the situation of hypertext as the research area is formed by the methodology of historical-philosophical inquiry. Such a heuristics brings contemporary historians of philosophy together with theorists of structuralism, which had previously dominated the studies of language and social sciences.