intellectual history - Europe and the West
An intellectual is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas. There are, broadly, three modern definitions at work in discussions about intellectuals. First, 'intellectuals' as those deeply involved in ideas, books, the life of the mind. Second, 'intellectuals' as a recognizable occupational class consisting of lecturers, professors, lawyers, doctors, scientist, etcetera. Third, cultural "intellectuals" are those of notable expertise in culture and the arts, expertise which allows them some cultural authority, and who then use that authority to speak in public on other matters.

The social/intellectual context in the writings of western European history includes:

;*The Enlightenment: Human rights, new science, democracy (scholarly sources; Kant, Wilhelm Dilthey).

;*The Royal Society: A secular creation of an intellectual world led by figures such as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, Joseph Addison, Bishop Sprat.

;*The Encyclopaedists: The creation of central repositories of knowledge available to all outside of academies, including mass market encyclopaedias and dictionaries: Diderot, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire.

;*Romanticism : Individual, subjective, imaginative, personal, visionary (scholarly sources Carlyle, Rousseau, Hook, Herder).

;*Post-romanticism: Reaction to naturalism, opposes external-only observations by adding internal observations (scholarly sources Comte, von Ranke).

;*Modernism : Rejects Christian academic scholarly tradition (scholarly sources Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Beard, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung).

;*Existentialism: Pre- and post-WW2 rejection of Western norms and cultural values. Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Claude Levi-Strauss, Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl. Engaged with the intellectual prominence of fascism and socialism in Europe during in the 1930s and 1940s, which they saw needed both repudiation and study, as a way to re-establish the individual against the values of a hostile and destructive series of communities creating alienation, isolation, and individual meaninglessness.

;*Postmodernism : Rejects Modernism, meta-narrative - multiple perspective, role of individual (scholarly sources Lyotard, Foucault, Barthes).

;*Structuralism : Many phenomena do not occur in isolation but in relation to each other (scholarly sources Geertz, Levi-Strauss).

;*Poststructuralism :Deconstruction, destablizes the relationship between language and objects the language refers to (scholarly sources Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault).

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