本文探討錢新J且老師的思想丈方法論，主妥取材、但不局限於他《焦竑典I!t明新儒學之重構》一書。第一節首先釐清“理論\"一詞在錢老師“前景化"思想和教學實踐中的特殊意義，它並非是等待被套用在中國例證上的外國公式模型，而是對作為主體建構條件之語言妥素的精級化自述。第二節，藉著分析三本晚近出版的中國思想丈著作，嘗試說明非思想傳記歷史學者如何運用和建構思想“脈絡"。比較之下，錢老師史學作業的特色，在於提供了一個豐富而且鎮密看待人類思想發展的方式;人類思想發展作為一個文本化的脈絡，人的主體性在其中不僅有意參與而且深深植床於三價結構化的論述形構之中。關於述句、物件和規律性這三償結構將在第三節中詳盡分析。

This essay is an investigation into my late mentor Edward T. Ch'ien's methodology of intellectual history， as it is practiced most systematically but not exclusively in his Clity Hung and the Restructuring of NeD-Confucianism in the Late Ming. I start by suggesting that Ch'ien's pedagogical performance of ever-foregrounding be considered as an embodiment of his personal formulation of relating contemporary critical theories to the study of Chinese intellectual history. Theory， in Ch'ien's classroom and his research practice as well， is viewed not as a universalizable Western model waiting to be uncritically imposed on any Chinese case， but rather as a well-formulated self-articulation of those linguistic media through which one's whole being is constituted. Secondly， by comparing Chiao Hung and the Restructuring with three other works published later in the same field， I attempt to demonstrate that， once moving beyond the genre of intellectual biography， historians have developed different approaches of dealing with a broader intellectual context， varying from a further elaboration of conventional wisdom to more aggressively interpretive acts of construction. Thirdly， the distinction of Ch'ien's historiographic operation consists in that he provided us a fully-fledged and sophisticated way of conceptualizing human intellectual development as a textualized context， in which human subjectivity is not only actively engaging with but also unintentionally embedded in a triadically-structured discursive formation in terms of uttered statements， deployed objects， and the discursive regularity.