ABSTRACT
J. H. Randall is suggesting not only that the ability to produce good intellectual history, or history of philosophy, involves the ability to do good philosophy but that something philosophically valuable can be learned from good history of ideas. The historical fact would seem to be, rather, that the innovations of the non-positivist, historical experientialism of American philosophy —with its notions of a humanist religion and of a science in service to humanity— had not found the kind of support in the culture which could have helped it resist the bureaucratic onslaught of the fashion for simplifying logical techniques. As a productive critic who identified equally with the enterprise of philosophy and the enterprise of history, Randall believed that the practice of insightful philosophic history requires the formulating of a philosophy of cultural change. To be philosophic as well, histories of philosophy must deal non-reductively and analytically with the systems and sets of ideas which are their subject-matter.
