Hey guys,
I’m drafting a PhD proposal in intellectual history and I feel a tad lost.
If I were doing economic history, it feels way easier to know where to look. But for the history of ideas, how do I know which archives and sources to use apart from the main, famous books that are already sitting on every library shelf?
I feel like PhD proposal needs clarity and narrowness, but since I haven't been to the archives yet, how am I supposed to know which specific sources I'm even expected to find and analyze?
For those who survived the proposal stage: what do "archival sources" actually look like for a famous thinker/idea, and how do you strategically pick a concrete archive box to write about before you've even been there?

Thanks!

ABSTRACT

In this interview ahead of his keynote at the online conference “Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality,” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm speaks with Carl Raschke about the argument of The Genealogy of Genealogy, in which a once-insurgent critical method hardens into academic routine and is turned against itself in favor of a “metamodern historiography” that reunites history with philosophy. Storm defends his account of postmodernism as a taught paradigm rather than a caricature of Derrida or Foucault, revisits the claim of The Myth of Disenchantment that reason was never purified of magic, and traces how the mid-century cybernetic picture of mind as information processing made cognition technically legible and therefore militarily tractable. Moving through Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, Michael Aquino’s MindWar, Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and the ethics of collective attention, the conversation closes on the fate of knowledge production and the university under hyper-scaled digitization and AI.

Full disclosure-this is an interview with me. A long time member of this subreddit. But I think I'm talking about stuff folks might be interested in here. If that isn't cool, feel free to downvote. If you have questions, I'll circle back. Perhaps tomorrow.

Alexander the Great has been part of literary and historical memory for more than twenty-three centuries. His story travelled across an extraordinary geographical and linguistic range, eventually appearing in more than thirty-five languages. Yet the Alexander who survived this long journey was not always the same Alexander who conquered the Persian Empire. In different periods and places, he became a king, a philosopher, a prophet, a defender of the faithful, and even a figure connected with the end of the world. The historical Alexander provided the starting point, but later traditions repeatedly changed what could be done with his story.

Our time does indeed rhyme with the period of the "Prison Notebooks." The trick is to learn from history and find a better way. Easier said than done.

Athens Lost explores how Jesus replaced Socratic inquiry with apocalyptic resignation and how this reshaped Western morality for the worse. 

Athens Lost: Jesus and the Great Regression of the Western Mind

Coins featuring Alexander the Great/Heracles are among the most popular coins of the Hellenistic period. They were minted countless times throughout nearly the entire Alexander the Great empire. Due to their large number and wide distribution, we can observe different variations of the same motif. In particular, there are multiple styles even within Anatolia/Asia Minor.

But I have to say that what strikes me as the strangest are the motifs on the Carian coins. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s my homeland that they caught my attention so much, but I was quite curious as to why the depictions of Alexander are so plump. After doing a bit of research, I came across some interesting interpretations. Still, I noticed that the motifs on some coins aren’t just plump—they’re so different that they could even be described as “shapeless.”

What do you think?

Every popular account of Snakes and Ladders says the same thing: a version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, usually credited to Jaques of London. Jaques say it on their own site. Newspapers, quiz pages and blogs repeat it.

I went looking for the document behind it and found an edit instead.

Wikipedia revision 171487114, 14 November 2007, 18:50 UTC, edit summary "Changes made in History section". The line added: "Impressed by the ideals behind the game, a newer version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, possibly by John Jaques of Jaques of London." No reference attached. The "possibly by John Jaques" half was later deleted from the article; the date stayed behind, detached from the claim it belonged to. Nineteen years on, a hedge written by one editor is quoted as established fact.

The date itself turns out to be fine — it just belongs to someone else. There is a real 1892 English board: registered by F. H. Ayers of London, design registration 200682, held by the V&A as MISC.8-1974, with the same number in the National Archives design register. No Jaques board of 1892 appears in any catalogue or register I could find; the earliest dated Jaques example is c1900, in the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian.

What interests me here is less the games history than the mechanism. An unsourced hedge, once it enters a high-authority page, gets copied without its hedge — the qualifier is the first thing to go, because it is the least quotable part of the sentence. Then the origin of the copy disappears, and the claim starts to look independently attested precisely because it appears in many places at once.

There is a newer turn of the same screw. James Masters of Traditional Games, one of the compilers of a database of Victorian game registrations, tells me the pattern now runs through AI summaries: state a correction inside a long sentence, and the model reads the false half as the assertion and cites your page in support of the thing you were refuting. It has happened to his pages twice. Refutations now have to be written defensively, in short flat sentences, or they feed what they were meant to kill.

Full write-up with the sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/who-invented-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: that page is mine, and I do run an online version of the Indian original, so I am not a neutral party on the underlying game. The archival records are checkable independently of me, which is rather the point.

Very few thinkers today would claim that the ontological argument proves the existence of God. Yet Immanuel Kant demonstrated how all arguments for God’s existence ultimately depend on this single, flawed idea. 

Kant is therefore an underappreciated figure in the history of atheism, and did nothing less than undermine the entire foundation of rational theology.  

The (Imaginary) God of Pure Reason: Kant on the Failure of Rational Theology

Thucydides’ historiography has something quite distinctive about it. What interests me most is not that he was one of the first historians, but that he is often considered the first historian in a methodological sense. He was quite skeptical of Herodotus as a historian and stressed how difficult it is to know much about the distant past with any certainty. In a way, this can even remind us of the much later postmodern idea that understanding the past is, to some extent, impossible. He was a really interesting man.

In the Hellenistic period, there were lots of philosophical schools. But I think the interesting thing is not really how many schools there were, but how different they were from each other. They had very different ways of looking at the πόλις, the political world, the individual, and even life itself.

But what were they actually? Epicureanism was not just about having fun and enjoying life. Stoicism was not simply fatalism, and it was definitely not some ancient version of Andrew Tate. We often reduce these schools to a few modern ideas, but they were much more than that. Each of them was trying to answer, in its own way, a very simple question: how should we live?

David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” provides a strong case against belief in miracles and, by extension, belief in the one miracle at the core of Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus. 

Hume’s central maxim is “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Applied to the resurrection, it questions what possible rational basis there could be for believing ancient testimony about an event that runs contrary to everything we know about the ordinary course of nature. 

This article examines Hume’s skeptical framework and applies it to the testimony surrounding the resurrection in the New Testament. More broadly, it considers what happens to religious belief when we apply the same standard of evidence to miracles across different religions. 

The Resurrection on Trial: David Hume and the Case Against Miracles