Abstract

What are ideas? How have new ideas emerged? How have ideas been preserved or altered? Whoever ‘has got an idea’ may believe it fell from the skies. Yet in so far as they become intelligible, ideas must have grown out of some tradition, and in so far as they are significant, new ideas grow from them. In a nutshell: Ideas are always connected historically. How such connections are to be explored constitutes the subject matter of this book, focussing on method.