Another and more satisfying answer to the problem has been the assumption that the opposing schools of philosophy do not merely have a common share in error but that they rather share in a common truth. This assumption was held in antiquity by the so-called eclectics and by the Neo-Platonists; it was reasserted on different grounds by Hegel; and it still underlies the better part of the studies devoted to the "history of ideas."--Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pico: An Introduction.
In reading these lines, I had to think of Bill Wimsatt, the philosopher of biology and metaphysician of life, who was one of my teachers in graduate school. Unlike most professional philosophers (who tend to delight in criticism and critical acumen) that I know, Bill's intellectual reflex is to look for common ground when confronted with new material. (This is not to deny that there are positions that Bill dislikes intensely.) Bill's approach is not my intellectual reflex, but these Digressions are, in part, my attempt at self-re-fashioning in light of his example (while not foregoing polemic).
Prior to reading Kristeller's claim, I was familiar with three not necessarily mutually exclusive ways of understanding the nature of history of ideas. First, it is exhibited in the practice of tracing influence(s) within the history of philosophy. Among European (mainland) historians of philosophy, the following practice is a kind of second-nature: X said Y, now let's search for anticipations of Y. The practice is nicely captured by Wikipedia's definition: "The history of ideas is a field of research in historythat deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time." Second, there is Lovejoy's more technical focus on tracing the fate of what he calls 'unit-ideas:'
By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiated primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new groupings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial procedure may be said—though the parallel has its dangers—to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unit-ideas.--Arthur Lovejoy The Great Chain of Being, 3.
I like to think of Lovejoy's focus on unit-ideas as an anticipation of contemporary memetics in some respects. Unit-ideas are kind of "mental habits" (15) that are instantiated in different intellectual and conceptual contexts, but that also by their presence generate forced moves (what I call 'conceptual-necessitation relations') or creative innovations. As others have noted, Lovejoy does not really deploy the term outside the introduction to the book, so it is not entirely clear what he really means by it. (Incidentally, Bill Wimsatt has penetrating contribution to memetics while developing his account of cultural evolution.)
Third, in the works of Isaiah Berlin we find a kind of soft-Hegelian tracing of ideas. Berlin was acutely sensitive to the phenomenon that certain groups of ideas (e.g., ones associated with the Enlightenment) generated critical responses (ones we understand by, e.g., Romanticism, or Anti-Enlightenment Conservativism) that, in turn, would generate responses, and so on. In Berlin this does not become a dynamics of reason or an unfolding of rational history (because Berlin is too tragic to have much faith in progress).
In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Kristeller sees Pico as a contributor to the history of ideas understood in the fourth sense as the search for a common truth among different competing systems. Kristeller emphasizes this is not a search for a hidden esoteric doctrine: rather, it "consists in a number of true statements" shared by different outlooks. Given that it is a search for truth as such -- and not, as in the other three approach to the history ideas, a truth about or of history -- Pico's history of ideas is not opposed to philosophy but, rather, philosophical in a non-trivial sense. It is also receptive to learning from others and, thus, instantiates genuine philosophical virtue.
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