My mind constantly tried to make reference to Hegelian phenomenology too as I went along reading Hegel. The Weberian disenchantment thesis as well, as well as Koyre like mentions, and Foucault's renaissance vs. modern epistemes. Reinhart Koselleck too, if you've ever read that.
Something like Vernunft (Reason) finally coming into its full maturity after languishing in Vorstellung, and naive ideas about static "Being" being "in" the world, rather than the world being a deistic-mechanistic thing with only the efficient/material causes like Koyre says. (Actually, fun fact: Lovejoy says this too, in an essay on Darwin around 1905.)
>What's most distinctive in philosophic systems through time, he says, are their shapes, their 'patterns' in direct opposition to their components (or unit ideas) which remain (deeper than Hegel, or as a cool Parmenides to Hegel's too ardent Hetaclitus) more or less the same
>music
That's actually an interesting comparison, especially if you extend it to chords as well (combinations of notes that not always but often go together). Or even leitmotivs that develop and get progressively more complex and baroque.
Are you familiar at all with Charles Taylor's book on Hegel? The first chapter was CONSTANTLY reminding me of Lovejoy's GCoB. Lovejoy says (in his essays on Romanticism) that organicism (holism) and "vitalism" (integral self-expression) were the novel ideas of the Romantic era, meaning late 18th Germany onward, which is more or less exactly Taylor's thesis about the trends that Hegel was addressing.
We read Skinner and Pocock for the same class and I liked them a lot. I had always seen the Cambridge school as too simplistic but Pocock in particular is awesome.
I'm just finishing it up now. My main problem is:
>a term is to be defined that Lovejoy himself hesitated to define in any strict sense
When Lovejoy hesitates to pin down what an idea or unit-idea is, he usually does so (in GCoB and several articles) by showing that it can be any variety of affective state, judgment, or concept. This provides a lot of "ontical" flexibility in what an idea can be, but it doesn't really clarify the its ontological status, i.e., how it interacts with other historical entities (actors, periods, discourses) OUTSIDE of its class.
To be more specific, it's easy enough to say that an historically motive "idea" could be "an aesthetic or emotional preference or metaphysical conception." But before you can talk about the different types, you want to first ask: "What do 'historical' and 'motive' mean?" How do "conceptions" transfer, how are they shared, between people? Between periods? How do they prefigure discourse (like a paradigm, or theory-laden perception) vs. how do they figure into discourses?
Lovejoy has a lot of interesting stuff to say on the variety of ideas, ontically, but he doesn't really talk about what they ARE. How they move from mind to mind, period to period, etc.
