ABSTRACT
Both philosophers and intellectual historians take 'ideas' as their common currency, but they look at the question in wholly different ways. For philosophers, whatever their choice of definitions, ideas are in some sense mental phenomena that are adequately represented and communicated in the philosopher's oral or written discourse and argument. For historians, however, ideas are in the first place social and cultural constructions, and the product of a complex process of inference, judgment, and criticism on the part of the scholar. The history of ideas has long been situated in the midst of this semantic confusion, and it is important to move carefully between the conflicting demands of historical accuracy and philosophical clarity. The question of ideas became central to Renaissance philosophy and its history, especially in connection with the many comparisons and contrasts between Plato and Aristotle which were begun in antiquity, revived in the Byzantine East, and imported into the West in the fifteenth century.
