The logic of the history of ideas

This paper provides a short summary of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas. Logic stands here as a subset of Wittgenstein's notion of philos ophy as a matter of the grammar of our concepts. It studies the forms of re asoning appropriate to a discipline, rather than the material of that disci pline. Hence, the logic of the history of ideas considers the nature of mea ning, the way we should justify our knowledge of past meanings, and how we should explain things such as the existence of meanings, the beliefs people held, and conceptual change.