Abstract

Philosophic reflection should consider more and different kinds of historical writing than it generally has; the logical features of cultural and intellectual history are important. Certain highly selected features of products of human activities-not individuals or actions-are the subject matter of typical instances of intellectual history; and these features are singled out by the historian's abstracting imagination. In the "stories" which such historians tell, not only are events placed in sequential order, but the relation of reasons to products are traced above all in such a way as to show how some later result is composed of various earlier components. Causality is not the central unifying theme; tracing the relations that hold among the features of various human products is worthwhile even where knowledge of causes remains obscure