Abstract

The methodological trend of contextualism has almost come to dominate current discourse in intellectual history. But the genesis of a text may defy the immediate context of time and space. Insofar as authors of texts may reflect upon the complex act of their creation in the process of composing them, the texts' "meaning" may have as much to do with the internal demands of mind as the external pressures of the cultural or political environment. The status of ideas in history is more complex than a contextualist reduction of meaning to usage would imply, and the act of knowing on the part of a thinker is not necessarily determined by the available means of knowing, the paradigms of language and discourse. There are thinkers whose depths of knowledge surpass the ordinary range of words, in whom some truths we feel are introspectively discoverable