Philosophical elaboration must be performed within the history of philosophy

Evidence

What must next be explained is how it happens that in all periods there co-exist many systems and currents of philosophical thought, how these currents are born, how they are diffused, and why in the process of diffusion they fracture along certain lines and in certain directions. The fact of this process goes to show how necessary it is to order in a systematic, coherent and critical fashion one’s own intuitions of life and the world, and to determine exactly what is to be understood by the word “systematic”, so that it is not taken in the pedantic and academic sense. But this elaboration must be, and can only be, performed in the context of the history of philosophy, for it is this history which shows how thought has been elaborated over the centuries and what a collective effort has gone into the creation of our present method of thought which has subsumed and absorbed all this past history, including all its follies and mistakes. Nor should these mistakes themselves be neglected, for, although made in the past and since corrected, one cannot be sure that they will not be reproduced in the present and once again require correcting. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1183

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what Gramsci means by ‘systematic’ elaboration of one’s worldview — historically and collectively conditioned, not pedantically academic.
• XREF: This connects forward to the Islamophobia toolkit’s need to treat ‘common sense’ and everyday categories as historically sedimented, not natural. — connects to: All philosophical thought, however abstract, is constituted from historical material — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 755; Philosophy’s legitimation role requires reworking its bond to the university — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 641