ABSTRACT
History of philosophy and intellectual history are most plainly seen to come together when intellectual historian are forced to practice what authors call foundational analysis, namely, when they feel the need to uncover the "indubitables" of a society—as they have sometimes been called. The intellectual historian cannot neglect the less reflective or apparently non-reflective products of a civilization without depriving himself of the contextualizing elements and dimension that make him more than a specialized historian of art or science, or a specialized political or religious historian. The danger of sociological reductionism, in the understanding and practice of contextualized intellectual history, is avoided by the knowledge that, in one of its dimensions, intellectual history is foundational analysis and so also a philosophic discipline. The historian of philosophy must often be able to do his own reconstructing of the contextualizing sociohistory he needs, in order to achieve undogmatic understanding of the texts.
