Studying a worldview’s origin requires philological reconstruction and identifying discarded provisional elements.

Evidence

If one wishes to study the birth of a conception of the world which has never been systematically expounded by its founder (and one furthermore whose essential coherence is to be sought not in each individual writing or series of writings but in the whole development of the multiform intellectual work in which the elements of the conception are implicit) some preliminary detailed philological work has to be done. This has to be carried out with the most scrupulous accuracy, scientific honesty and intellectual loyalty and without any preconceptions, apriorism or parti pris . … It is only the former elements which are essential aspects of the process of development. This selection can be made for periods of varying length, determined by intrinsic factors and not by external evidence (though that too can be utilised) and it results in a series of “discards”, that is to say of partial doctrines and theories for which the thinker may have had a certain sympathy, at certain times, even to the extent of having accepted them provisionally and of having availed himself of them for his work of criticism and of historical and scientific creation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1358

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s method here — reading an implicit coherence across all of a thinker’s work, not single writings — parallels the reader’s own scaffolding approach to building a critical-theory vocabulary.

Related

• A philosophy’s intellectual sources do not constitute its essential content (similarity 0.81)
• No systematic research attributes the original philosophy of praxis thought (similarity 0.81)
• Philosophy’s history must include mass worldviews and ruling groups, not just philosophers (similarity 0.80)
• A thinker’s sources cannot explain the originality of their thought (similarity 0.80)
• Studying an unsystematic founder’s worldview requires scrupulous philological reconstruction (similarity 0.80)
• Philosophical elaboration must be performed within the history of philosophy (similarity 0.79)
• The philosophy of praxis began as scattered aphorisms encoding a full worldview (similarity 0.79)
• A new philosophy is defined by transforming how philosophy itself is conceived (similarity 0.78)
• A thinker’s own thought must be separated from earlier material that only stimulated it (similarity 0.78)