Abstract

Western intellectual history, viewed as the way things occurred, simultaneously or in a time sequence, requires interpretation even more substantively than does history in general. This is because as being a history of specifically intellectual activity it is a history of a type of activity that necessarily includes concurrent self-interpretation, as he who understands understands that he understands. There is, though, a sense in which all human activity is intellectual, as, for Aquinas, the intellectual soul is forma corporis. Hence it is that any piece of historiography is necessarily a work of interpretation of what has happened, if only because it is never in the first place a record of what happened but of what was done, only as a result of which certain things happened. All the same, in a history of theoretical intellect the bond of interpretation with things thought or said will be that much closer than it is with things done as recorded in the various histories of practical intellect.