Abstract
The renowned British historian Quentin Skinner is significant in the contemporary world of thought.His scholarship is best known for his two-volume book,The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,in which he studies prominent European thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation periods and examines how their writings shaped modern politics and society. Since his early days,Skinner has actively explored innovations in historical theory and method while studying the history of political thought. Several of his essays published in the 1960 s and 1970 s reflect this path of thinking and its evolution. Skinner holds a critical stance against the positivist tradition of modern historiography. Drawing on the work of linguistic philosophers such as J. L. Austin, he explores how the“illocutionary act” implied by language and ideas needs to be understood by reading contemporary writings and understanding the linguistic conventions of the time. Skinner's research helps promote a “linguistic turn” in academies of the time,but he is not a poststructuralist nor a postmodernist. While making a distinctive contribution to historical theory and methodology as “philosophy in history”,Skinner's scholarship remains within the “Eurocentric” tradition and has not interacted actively with the general trend in post-WWⅡ historiography.英国史家昆廷·斯金纳闻名遐迩,是当代世界思想界的重量级人物,斯金纳的学术以两卷本的《近代政治思想的基础》一书而闻名于世。他以文艺复兴和宗教改革时期欧洲著名思想家为对象,研究他们的论著如何形塑了近代国家的政治和社会。从早年起,斯金纳便在研究政治思想史的同时,积极探讨史学理论和方法的创新。他在20世纪60和70年代出版的数篇论文,就已经反映了这一思考路径及其演变。斯金纳对近代史学的实证主义传统,持有批判的立场。他通过借鉴约翰·奥斯汀等语言哲学家的著作,探究语言和观念所隐含的"言外之意"如何需要通过阅读同时代的著作,了解当时的语言习惯来获取对其真切的理解。斯金纳的探索有助推广学术界的"语言学转向",...