Intellectual history and the history of philosophy

Recently, the relation of intellectual history to the history of philosophy seems to be an American concern. I can give two examples. Ten years ago, Richard Rorty wanted the history of philosophy to be written as an intellectual history. Six years ago, Donald Kelley reminded us that intellectual history was nothing more than an offspring of the history of philosophy and that it was never very distant from it. Rorty argues as a philosopher. He speaks of histories of philosophy written by philosophers who tend to think that philosophy ‘owns’ its proper history. Their histories should be abandoned, says Rorty, since we have enough doxographies or ‘histories of the peaks’. Rather, we should write ‘nitty-gritty’ intellectual histories of philosophy and try to see past philosophies within the context of what they meant to their contemporaries. In this view, philosophers are not merely ‘holding’ opinions, they are not merely theoreticians, system-builders, or writers, but most of all thinkers who must be understood in the intellectual context of their time and place. Rorty urges us to let go any form of mirroring: the history of philosophy should not look back into past and forgotten ideas, but it should give a historico-critical reconstruction of the intellectual dimension of philosophy.