Donald R. Kelley:

" . . . intellectual history is an irretrievably interdisciplinary area of inquiry, and . . . its primary topics of inquiry--philosophy, literature, language, art, science, and other disciplines--each has its own tradition of historical inquiry. The result is that intellectual history has had to invent, or to appropriate, concepts to define its area of competence and cognizance: the history of philosophy (in an extended sense), the history of culture (in a restricted sense), or more problematic formulations, such as the history of ideas, the history of thought, the human spirit, ideologies, and more modern fashions serving the same function (such as mentalités and, most recently, cultural memory)."

Anthony Pagden:

"There is a history of the rise and decline of Intellectual History, as a discipline in this century. It goes something like this: The subject has murky, nineteenth-century origins in a widened understanding of a text-dependent Kulturgeschichte. It flourished, however, in the pre- and immediately post-war years under a new guise [in North America], as the History of Ideas . . . . This [type of] history was neither the history of the intellectual Geist of a given time and place (as, say, Dilthey's early work had been), nor was it the more obviously philosophical history (most properly a Geistesgeschichte) which had been around since at least the eighteenth century and whose purpose was largely philosophical. . . . The History of Ideas died and was replaced by histories of 'mentalities', as a subsidiary of a broader social history, which was believed to be, in some sense, about the 'real', the lived lives of ordinary people.

'Mentality', in this context, looked suspiciously like the earlier concept of an 'ideology', but was believed to have penetrated deeper into the habits and customs of peoples, ordinary and not so ordinary. . . . What was left of the old Lovejoy project collapsed into an increasingly narrow concern with philology and the hunt for 'influences' of one writer upon another, later one. It was replaced, too, and with a far greater degree of success, by a number of ancillary histories: the history of the book, the social history of ideas, the history of intellectual groups, and so on. . . . At much the same time, Intellectual History was re-invented out of post-Hegelian hermeneutic theories as a late-nineteenth and twentieth-century concern with ideologies. In the U.S. today, Intellectual History is a term that describes a generally Marxist, sometimes Freudian, increasingly post-structuralist understanding of the ordering of the political consciousness of the past hundred years or so.

. . . The human sciences will always be at the mercy of whatever the Geist most urgently wants to know about. . . . And the Geist of 2000 has other concerns than those which agitated the professors of the pre-war years. Quite what this new history will look like I cannot say. But I suspect it will be far less obviously historicist than its predecessors, far less timid about its focus on ideas, and perhaps, too, less concerned with linguistics than it has been recently. . . ."

Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann:

"Naturally, intellectual history was the recipient of the tradition of Geistesgeschichte; and, quite understandably, it stood in close proximity to Kulturgeschichte. But those were both national traditions, and an essential goal of the 'International Society for Intellectual History' is to bring these different national traditions into dialogue with each other. If the nationally-conceived traditions were to begin to compete with each other, that is precisely what is to be expected for a [new approach to] 'intellectual history'.

. . . Intellectual history concerns itself with the history of philosophy, the history of the natural sciences as well as with the cultural sciences [Geisteswissenschaften], with history and historiography, histories of theology and heresies, legal history, the history of philology, the history of art--and, in addition, with the history of each of those fields' concepts.

The history of knowledge is tightly bound up with the history of institutions through which that knowledge is passed on, augmented and communicated: therefore the history of universities, academies, courts, monasteries, schools belongs to intellectual history. That is true as well for the history of book printing and publishing, for the transformation of media of communication, for the history of reading and censorship, for clandestine literature, the history of scholars and intellectuals, the history of the 'republic of letters' and its transformations.

In a certain manner, intellectual history also implies a programmatic approach to a cultural history (in Aby Warburg's sense). It encompasses thereby a hermeneutics and its history, a history of ideas and of concepts, a history of beliefs and superstitions, a history of the human spirit [Geistesgeschichte] and of world-views. It does not exclude the history of discourses and intends also to include the history of literary, learned and scientific topoi; it pays attention to national literatures, including their interrelations with each other; and it concerns itself with literary criticism...

As an historical discipline, intellectual history is concerned to deal with the history of developments, breaks, and continuities, ranging from antiquity to the present. To the degree its task is to have an international emphasis, the histories of national as well as supra-national traditions play an essential role, for a knowledge of particularities is the presupposition for a hermeneutics of the whole. . . ." [translated by Steven Lestition]

Edoardo Tortarolo:

"I would rather pick up [on Donald] Kelley's descriptive definition of intellectual history as comprising a range of approaches to texts, which intellectual historians analyze with all possible techniques and asking all possible questions. I would suggest that typical of the intellectual historian is keeping in mind two points, which distinguish the approach . . . from other perfectly legitimate approaches. The first point is the texts' nature as historical artifacts, produced in time, before and after other texts, while the second point is the texts' relevance to an historical problem, whose analysis requires the assumption of a non-textual reality, which the historian projects from his present into the past. Intellectual history is therefore a common ground, strongly interdisciplinary but clearly staked out, for historians of various origins (the historical interest is crucial)."

Francoise Waquet:

"[Intellectual history] is first of all a complex history which links, in a manner that's indissociable, the history of ideas and the history of the frameworks [cadres] and forms of intellectual life. . . .
Even if it gives a suitable role to famous names and the great works of thought, [it] does not limit itself in my view to merely a few 'pharoahs'. It includes not just authors of the second or third rank, but far more the public of educated individuals as well. . . .

In my view, intellectual history inscribes itself, necessarily, within the longue durée. Intellectual phenomena always have a prehistory and they cannot really be fully intelligible without consideration being given to complex historical evolutions. Let me be precise: it is not a matter of giving short shrift to the significance of an epoch, but of immersing oneself in the past to search for the most diverse sorts of elements which, in their various combinations, contributed to making a situation such as it is, and not otherwise." [translated by Steven Lestition]