History of Ideas

Every entry in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas used texts. The following is a list of entries that focused mainly on the history of a succession of texts. Each academic discipline has a succession of major authors with whom later practitioners of the discipline build upon and respond to creatively. The historian of a discipline—such as the history of political philosophy, literary history, or the history of science—considers the responses of thinkers and practitioners of a discipline to the major earlier texts in the discipline.

The first Dictionary of the History of Ideas is known especially for the history of influential texts. Most significantly, while all articles of NDHI discuss influential texts and provide an up-to-date bibliography, there are very few articles in the NDHI that are primarily the history of texts.

One of the pervasive phenomena in the history of science is the development of independent disciplines from the solution or attempted solutions of problems in other areas of science. In the Twentieth Century, the creation of specialties witqin the sciences has accelerated to the point where a large number of scientists in any major branch of science cannot understand the work of a colleague in another subdiscipline of his own science.