Text, Context, and Psychology in Intellectual History

Abstract

I have two basic purposes in this essay. The first is to argue against a current tendency in intellectual history to devalue or ignore the role of historical context in interpreting the texts with which it often deals, in the name of theories which insist on the self-sufficiency of language or text. The second is to argue for the proposition that biographical-psychological context is often indispensable in intellectual history and always irreducible to other levels of explanatory context.