Mark Bevir outlines the nature and importance of the history of ideas. (2:50 min)

Patterns of family life, debates in politics, religious observances, technological inventions, scientific beliefs, literature, and the arts--all of these things are aspects of human culture. Typically we define a broad concept of human culture in contrast to physical and biological processes. One key feature differentiates the cultural, even if the precise boundaries between it, the physical, and the biological sometimes remain blurred. Cultural phenomena convey meanings, and they do so because cultures are composed at least in part of beliefs. Some components of a culture, such as political tracts and literary works, usually stand as self-conscious attempts to convey meanings through language. Other components of a culture, such as sculpture and painting, usually stand as self-conscious attempts to convey meanings through non-linguistic forms. Yet other components of a culture, such as habits of association and sporting activities, do not usually represent any sort of self-conscious attempt to convey meanings. In each of these cases, however, the objects and activities in question constitute cultural phenomena precisely because they do convey meanings. Students of culture concentrate on the meanings conveyed by patterns of behaviour, forms of social organisation, economic systems, technical inventions, and the like, not on these things in themselves.

ideas is to study meaning, and so culture, from a historical perspective. But then the study of culture must always be parasitic on history. Although scholars can evaluate cultural phenomena epistemically, morally, or aesthetically, they cannot evaluate what they do not know, and the only way they can acquire knowledge of cultural phenomena is through historical studies. Thus, a recognition of the meaningfulness of human life combines with a historical consciousness to place questions of interpretation at the centre of the human sciences. Because human life is meaningful, students of the human sciences have to undertake the interpretation of cultural phenomena. Because cultural phenomena exist and are handed down in time, students of the human sciences have to interpret cultural phenomena in terms of historical processes. Given that we can define the history of ideas as the study of meaning, an adequate theory of culture requires a suitable grasp of the nature of the history of ideas. Equally we can say that a philosophical inquiry into the logic of the history of ideas can provide us with the beginnings of a theory of culture.

How does history impinge on the ideas of philosophers? (2:04 min)

How should we conduct a philosophical inquiry into the logic of the history of ideas? This is a metaphilosophical question. Just as we uncover the logic of any particular discipline by engaging in a philosophical analysis of that discipline, so to uncover the logic of philosophy we have to engage in a philosophical analysis of philosophy itself. Before we can turn our attention to the particular logic of the history of ideas, therefore, we have to examine, first, the nature of philosophy, and, second, the types of arguments proper to philosophy. To identify the logic of any discipline one has to uncover the forms of reasoning appropriate to it by means of a study of the grammar of the concepts operating in it. In addition, we can draw out the grammar of a set of concepts, by means of both deductive and inductive arguments.