I suppose I’ll never quite forget how clueless I was when reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for the first times. Why, to name one confusion of many, did he not bother to provide more motivation for the very first sentence: “The world is everything that is the case”? Was there some common or perhaps divine intuition that I just failed to have? For me at least, things changed drastically when I read somewhere that Wittgenstein was greatly inspired by gestalt psychology. According to the approach he might have had in mind, then, we start grasping stuff from a holistic totality and analyse our way into details rather than from atoms from which we piece together an initially fragmented world. I’m not saying this is the whole story. But for me it provided a possible motivation that helped me understand a sentence that seemed to have been written without justification. Crucial context had been provided by something that seemed utterly absent from the text itself. However, once I took gestalt psychology into account, many things began to add up. By contrast, when texts are sufficiently current or explicit about their inspirations, their motivations seem fairly obvious. So much so that you can predict an author’s response to a given question as soon as you know some of their basic claims. Given demands of consistency, you sort of know what Ruth Milllikan would respond to the question of “whether ChatGPT can think”, even if she has not done so explicitly (just for the record, I’d say she’d point to her considerations of Swampman). But when texts are sufficiently remote in time or cultural conventions, it’s vital to take into account their sources of inspiration. In fact, I think scholarly forms of reading largely consist in re-establishing contexts of this sort. In what follows, I want to motivate this approach to reading and provide some further distinctions along the way.   

Imagining the author’s desk. – One of the first things you learn as a student of medieval philosophy is that you have to start by reading much of the Aristotelian corpus. Even if you don’t follow this advice, you’ll soon find that Aristotle is all over the place. Explicit and indeed implicit references to his works are woven into the fabric of most medieval philosophical texts. When you look at critical editions of medieval works, you’ll learn another important thing: Many medieval texts are full of often unacknowledged quotations from other authors. When you read William of Ockham, you’re often faced with a jumble of chunks from Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and others. This reading experience changed my attitude to texts generally: When I read a text, I (also) want to know which books were lying on the author’s desk when writing the text. The reason for searching such sources is not just a curiosity about the author’s inspirations or the phenomenon of intertextuality; often the material that inspired the author helps you understand the text at hand. Ockham, for instance, will presuppose that his readers also read Boethius or Aquinas. So he wouldn’t bother explaining an issue when a brief reference to a theory of an earlier author would do. While Ockham’s own brief reference can leave you clueless as a modern reader, looking at his sources might provide just what you need to understand where he is coming from. This means that you can figure out what Ockham was trying get at when looking at earlier stuff. Accordingly, the more material on Ockham’s desk you can identify the better you’ll understand his frames of reference and – perhaps – ways of thinking.     

Leaning from Jenny Ashworth. – For students of philosophy, (early) modern philosophy is often introduced as an era in which philosophers shook off the reverence and references to prior authorities. Accordingly, these texts (seem to) encourage a mode of reading as if they were written straightforwardly “for you”, i.e. without the need to recur to earlier, especially scholastic, sources. As I see it, such authors were basically just better at hiding their sources. Jennifer Ashworth’s work on post-medieval scholasticism, even in figures such as John Locke, debunk this myth of textual autonomy, pushing the contextualisation to an instructive extreme. While Locke seems to pretend, even at the time of writing his Essay, that he is completely out of touch with Aristotelian and scholastic sources, Ashworth and others have shown clearly that he was very much inspired or at least wrestling with this material (here is one of Ashworth’s papers on this issue). What helps, then, in understanding such authors is the diligent study of contemporary and earlier texts and trying to get a picture of the books in their libraries.

What to look for. – Studying an author’s sources or gathering them from scrupulous critical editions is a good starting point for getting at the ‘material basis’. But you’re not doing a plagiarism check. (Of course, you might do, and conclude that all authors were less original than you thought, but that would merely betray a lack of understanding intertextuality.) So in what way can you exploit such sources? As I see it, imagining the author’s desk can get from very concrete kinds of inspiration, i.e. the very words someone actually quotes, to fairly abstract modes of thinking: so you’re looking for quoted words, imitated styles, related kinds of arguments, common principles, terminology, leading concepts or models. One thing that made me apply this strategy of reading more explicitly as a proper method was the realisation that I use unacknowledged forms of inspiration much of the time myself. When I wrote my PhD dissertation on Ockham’s philosophy of mental language, for instance, I was greatly inspired by my studies of linguistics, especially text linguistics. Even though hardly any of that made it into my text, certain ways of linguistic reasoning continuously served as a backdrop for my reading and writing. So if I write like this myself, it’s not entirely outlandish to assume that other people were and are inspired in similar ways.

Figuring out how an author ‘thinks’. – Eventuallly, this approach to reading might get you into very elusive interpretive territory. Going from what other texts might have inspired an author’s writing, you might get a feel for more abstract kinds of inspiration. Does John Locke think like a mechanist or does his medical background have a bearing on his thought, such that he might be said to think like a biologist avant la lettre? While this kind of issue is very elusive indeed and very hard to argue for, you might try and find some evidence in the way an author construes or exploits examples, thought experiments or analogies. While elusive, certain styles of reasoning preclude certain forms of consideration and might provide insights into what enables discoveries or inventions (or what might have blocked them).

In other words, trying to make ‘the context’ of a text concrete by imagining sources of inspiration re-establishes the conceptual space in which you can see an author moving within the boundaries that provide both consistency and limitations.   

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* Here is part one of the series on reading.