Intellectual history refers to the history of human thoughts in
written form. This history cannot be considered without the
knowledge of the men and women who created, discussed, wrote
about and in other ways were concerned with ideas. Intellectual
history is closely related to the history of philosophy and the
history of ideas. Its central premise is that ideas do not
develop in isolation from the people who create and use them and
that one must study ideas not as abstract propositions but in
terms of the culture, lives and historical contexts that
produced them. Intellectual history aims to understand ideas
from the past by understanding them in context. The term
'context' in the preceding sentence is ambiguous: it can be
political, cultural, intellectual and social. One can read a
text both in terms of a chronological context (for example, as a
contribution to a discipline or tradition as it extended over
time) or in terms of a contemporary intellectual moment (for
example, as participating in a debate par