Many of us find it hard to disentangle our interest in certain questions from our commitment to a particular approach. Certainly I do not know whether my decision to focus on the forms of justification and explanation appropriate to the history of ideas came before or after my decision to do so in a manner indebted to analytic philosophy. Perhaps the two cannot be separated. What I do know is that the work of Quentin Skinner, itself clearly influenced by analytic philosophy, first stirred my curiosity about issues germane to the logic of the history of ideas. My decision to draw on analytic philosophy to undertake a normative study of the forms of reasoning appropriate to the history of ideas has taken me away from the dominant concerns of the hermeneutic tradition, and, in particular, the ontological hermeneutics developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Whereas hermeneutic theorists typically concentrate on phenomenological and descriptive issues about the process of understanding, I have tried to provide a logical and normative analysis of the ways in which we should justify and explain the understandings we reach. Whereas they concentrate on the nature of understanding as an intellectual activity, I have grappled with the logical forms appropriate to arguments within the history of ideas. To have concerns other than those that dominate the hermeneutic tradition is not, however, to deny the validity of that tradition.