History, ideas, transmission

Tutors: Stephen Clucas, Caroline Humfress and others.

The core course will provide an introduction to the History of Ideas, considering historiographical, methodological and theoretical issues. It will examine the definition of and disciplinary boundaries between Intellectual History, the History of Ideas, the History of Philosophy and Cultural History. Each class will focus upon a specific historiographical debate in order to draw upon wider conceptual material and arguments in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Preliminary Reading:

Berlin, I. (ed. Hardy, H.), The Power of Ideas (2001)

Cahoone, L., From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (2nd ed. 2003)

Jay, M., Force fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (1993)

Kelley, D. R., The Descent of Ideas: the History of Intellectual History (2002)

———, History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (1997)

———, The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations (1990)

Horowitz, M.C. ed,. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, six volumes (2004) [Reference Work]

King, P., Thinking Past a Problem. Essays on the History of Ideas (2000)

LaCapra, D., Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983)

Parsons, J., “Defining the History of Ideas” Journal of the History of Ideas 68.4 (2007) 683-699

Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S., Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (1985)

Skinner, Q., Regarding method, Vol. 1 of his Vision of Politics (2002)

Struever, N. (ed.), Language and the History of Thought (1995)

Whatmore, Richard and Young, Brian., Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History (2006)