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I've been working for a while on a joint article with @RyleHodges on the implications of Charles Taylor's philosophical anthropology for how we write the history of ideas. Our starting point is the ‘three levels of understanding’ he distinguishes in his 1992 Tanner Lecture.
The three levels are on a continuum from explicit to implicit and they’re (1) doctrines; (2) symbols and images; (3) embodied understanding. I was raised on Cambridge School contextualism, so I’d thought intellectual history is about (1) — that is, about fully articulated texts.
But in light of Taylor’s three levels, I realised this is only part of the story, because we can also approach it on at least two other levels — one about ideas as they’re being articulated in symbols, images, dreams, etc. and another about ideas as encoded in actions/behaviour.
This point was reinforced by when @RyleHodges and I read Beshara Doumani’s and Brinkley Messick’s work with the sharīʿa court records and Anver Emon’s work on the dhimmī rules. They’re so attentive to the level of the social imaginary and their histories are the richer for it.
I’d add @jeremyyellen’s work to this list. What I loved about his book on the Co-Prosperity Sphere is how he tells the story of its rise, fall and legacy as a story of the many and diverse ‘dreams’ (that’s literally the word the text ends with!) that this idea provided space for.
The history of ideas is as much about the passions they arise out of and which they arouse in turn — hopes, desires, fears, anxieties, etc. — and in the expressions of these passions we can trace all so vividly the changing visions of our world, both moral and natural.
