Who’s to say who’s a “leading mind”? Any choice “says,” at least: This is interesting
to me, which I share—worth your time, I hope.

Yet, to frame a mind as “leading” is typically done in terms of someone’s work, and inference is made to the authorship: work, framed as leading importance; authorship, mirrored by the work, as leading mind.

And selection mirrors the sensibility of selection, expressing selector engagement: project, prospective venture, idealization.

Given a work as leading, the leading mind (the authorship of the work) may give particularity to a selector’s sense of exemplary humanity, constellated from whatever selection of works that evidence to a reader a claim about an authorship as leading intelligence, leading mind, or exemplary humanity.

[The brevity of this page makes it implicitly a promissory note for elaboration—or linking to elaborations—of “conceptual literary studies” as philological (in a 21^st century sense), not especially cognitivist.]

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