Intersezioni | 2021 | N. 3

Introduzione al presente numero

Nowadays, one who writes the history of a field of knowledge is confronted with
two methodological injunctions that invite him to cross boundaries: globality and
interdisciplinarity. This is particularly true if this knowledge is still being practiced,
if its history is long and if it has widely circulated in space and across disciplines,
as is the case with philosophy. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the historicization
of learned practices accompanied their disciplinary institutionalization in
universities. The history of philosophy had the function of legitimizing disciplinary
practices by connecting them to a long-standing tradition, or by challenging the
tradition to mark a new beginning. In both cases, these uses of the past gave rise
to various methodological problems. This paper summarizes them under three key
words: anachronism, periodization and definition. It then presents a recent project
to overcome the disciplinary aporias of historicism: the history of knowledge. Finally,
it asks what the benefit would be of immersing the history of philosophy in the history
and anthropology of knowledge. As exemplary issues, it addresses two «savage»
continents of philosophical historiography: the Middle Ages and the United States
in the nineteenth century.

Many decades after its birth, Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte represents still a privileged source of inspiration even for scholars coming from theoretical and disciplinary fields far from its original context of elaboration. The aim of this essay
is to give an account of the most relevant contributions offered by this model to the renewal of studies on the history of thought, dwelling in particular on the notion of «basic historical concepts (Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe)» placed at the heart of Koselleck’s research on the language of political modernity.

This contribution intends to weave a dialogue – a pas de deux of sorts – between
the history of ideas and cultural studies. On the one hand, it is inevitable
to register the historical, disciplinary, even ideological distances between these two
critical bodies, especially in the way they deal with cultural history. However, it
is also possible to explore a common ground, for example in the analysis of the
semantic component of the history of thought that emerges from two concurrent
works such as Philip P. Wiener’s Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973-74) and
Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976). These and other seminal texts in the two fields
elaborate an explicitly interdisciplinary methodology, from which to explore further
contiguities that emerge palpably, though not often explicitly, when the history of
ideas is confronted with cultural practices. In particular, it is in the approach to
the literary text and, more broadly, to the question of aesthetics, that we will try
to interweave these critical movements, appreciating the new configurations, new
choreographies of thought, that emerge from their encounter.

This paper addresses some relevant transformations that have occurred in
the last decades in the field of art-historical methodologies. Firstly, it focusses on
the various «visual» or «iconic» or «pictorial» turns, which have opened up the
traditional areas of «high» art-historical research towards the domain of «low»
and extra-artistic images. Secondly, it considers some significant switches from the
qualitative to the quantitative, namely in the direction of experimental methods in
«neuroarthistory» and of distant viewing in «digital art history». At the same time,
adopting a perspective anchored in the history of ideas, it strives to exhibit the
historical roots of such contemporary methodological trends in the background of
the 19th and 20th century art-historical and aesthetic approaches.

The article presents a review of some recent attempts to apply quantitative
methods in the history of philosophy and the history of ideas: distributional concept
analysis; computational history of ideas; topic modeling; distant reading in the
history of philosophy; citation analysis; intellectual network analysis.

It was a hard beginning. Together with Matt Jockers, and a couple of librarians
and graduate students, we worked on a quantitative approach to novelistic descriptions;
nothing; on fictional incipits, the same. We continued, almost only by inertia,
until, in 2010, a meeting with Mike Witmore, who worked in Wisconsin, generated
a study that finally worked. We placed a sheet of paper with «Literary Lab» written
on it on the door of an empty office, and published the first of our pamphlets.
From then on, things changed. But before moving forward, let me take a few steps
back, to the time when a quantitative approach was only a hypothesis, mocked by
many and opposed by almost everyone. My reflections will be completely personal.
But the question behind them is not personal at all: has our knowledge of literature
changed? and changed how?