HSE Publishing House

This monograph covers studies that aim to reconstruct the contextual history of argumentative practices in various areas of intellectual culture in Western European antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern period, including theological thought, science, scholastic philosophy, and humanistic literature. The authors discuss topics that are important for understanding European intellectual culture such as the argumentative structure of philosophical, scientific, and theological writings; communication modalities of philosophical and scientific knowledge; and genre-specific and logical-semantic features of philosophical and scientific polemics. The history of philosophical and scientific thought is presented as a series of transformations in philosophical and scientific argumentation, and as a history of the invention of new arguments and the recurrence of polemical practices. In their reconstruction of the historical and philosophical process, the authors seek to take into account multiple extra-theoretical factors (social, political, and institutional) influencing the development of philosophy and science. Concepts, theses, and ideas are analyzed in the context of their usage in the dominant forms of intellectual culture.