 To reiterate, a historical and cultural contextualization of philosophical ideas is perhaps the most crucial methodological reform needed to change the way we understand the history of philosophy, and contextualization is just as important in regard to present day work as for philosophy written in the distant past. Contemporary approaches to philosophical historiography have sometimes assumed that contextualization is unnecessary, but this assumption, left unchallenged, can constrain critical analysis. When traditional historians of philosophy have begun to engage with questions of race, the problematics have sometimes been foreshortened by decontextualized methods of analysis. In this vein, Robert Bernasconi argues that naturalistic tendencies in analytic philosophy have overemphasized the question of whether a given philosopher believed in race as a natural kind, resulting in a limited interpretive exploration (2012, 552–553).