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Introduction30 paths and other circumstantial material.94 Yet others have asked disturbing questions about personhood, whether regarding the “existence” of a medieval royal figure whose identity has been obliterated by tradition,95 or the level of continuity that can be established between a young seventeenth-century Dutch orphan suffering from mental and physical paralysis and the high- handed minister of New Amsterdam that the same individual became in later life.96 In intellectual history, the biographer of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762– 1814) has appealed to the historical sociology of knowledge (as against the pre- vious preoccupation with language) as a source of new conceptual and meth- odological rigor, employing the notion of the intellectual field—“the realm of the culturally preconscious, of tacit beliefs and cognitive dispositions”—as a non-reductionist way to take account of social context: not a simple cause- and-effect mechanism, but “mediation and refraction.”97 Philosophers have worried that attempts at recovering the historical mean- ing of their predecessors with reference to the contextual origins of their thought jeopardizes the very status of philosophical ideas as transcending such contexts. This kind of skepticism might look even more pertinent in the case of scientists: critical commentary on scientific biography appeared to be in need of beginning with a “defense.”98 On this reckoning, science is defined by rigorous methods leading to verified results and tested theories, and the ac- cumulation of scientific knowledge as a steady process of incrementally add- ing particular truths to the larger edifice of established truths; as soon as such additions have been completed, those particular truths become detached from the past, rendering the process of discovery uninteresting, and the advances of science impersonal.99 To both philosophers and scientists, it can be objected 94 Franco Venturi, Jeunesse de Diderot (de 1713 à 1753) (Paris: Albert Skira, 1939). 95 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 96 Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007 [1995]). Cf. Frijhoff, “Experience and Agency at the Cross- roads of Culture, Mentality, and Contextualization: The Biography of Everhardus Bogar- dus (c.1607–1647),” in Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 65–105. 97 Anthony La Vopa, “Doing Fichte: Reflections of a Sobered (But Unrepentant) Contextual Biographer,” in Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 107–72, a meta-discussion of the same au- thor’s Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2001). 98 Thomas L. Hankins, “In Defence of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Sci- ence,” History of Science 17, no. 1 (1979): 1–16. 99 For an early, magisterial departure from this position, and an attempt (although not con- ceived biographically) to understand and reconstruct scientific discovery as a process consisting of equally relevant episodes, see I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).