²² Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83 (my italics). The study of philosophy in France does not make the same sharp distinction between philosophy itself and the history of philosophy, or even of ideas, as is current in the English-speaking world. Moreover, much recent English-language Descartes scholarship bridges these distinctions very effectively.