Wondering about intellectual history

Eco on intellectual history:

The real problem is different. If, for instance, someone asked whether my work had been influenced by Dewey or Merleau-Ponty, the philological problem would not be whether I have actually met Dewey and Melrealu-Ponty. The problem would be to establish first, whether there are detectable literal or conceptual analogies between my work and theirs, and, second, whether I had the physical possibility of reading the books of these thinkers.

This presents an interesting problem: the same thoughts seem to arise repeatedly across the globe in otherwise unconnected human heads merely because they are thinkable. I remember wondering at the age of 17, on my way to a physics lesson, about the logic of induction: you drop a ball, it falls; you do it again, it falls again; you do this 150,000 times and each time it falls; how do you from this assume that the same thing will happen the 150,001st time?. I was certainly not influenced by anyone's work in entertaining this curious idea, even though it has a veritable history in western philosophy of science.

Viewed in this light, is intellectual history possible?