ABSTRACTR. G. Collingwood is mostly remembered for his theory that historical understanding consists in re-enacting the thoughts of the historical figure whom one is studying. His first recognizable expression of this view followed from an argument about the emptiness of psychological interpretations of religion, and throughout his career Collingwood offered history as re-enactment as an alternative to psychology. Over time, his argument that the psychology of religion could not be relevant to the veracity of religious beliefs was supplanted by the (...) argument that psychology is self-undermining because the psychologist’s procedure of attributing beliefs to blind psychic needs could apply just as easily to the psychologist him- or herself. As an alternative to what he took to be the self-defeating psychological position, Collingwood put forward the study of the development of beliefs as the motivations for actions, which led him to his views that “all history is the history of thought” and that, in order to understand an historical event, we must mentally re-enact the thoughts that stood behind it. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner has enduringly insisted that a past text cannot be ‘understood’ without the reader knowing something about its historical and linguistic context. But since the 1970s he has been attacked on this central point of all his work by authors maintaining that the text itself is the fundamental guide to the author’s intention, and that a separate study of the context cannot tell the historian anything that the text itself could not. Mark Bevir has spent much of the last (...) 20 years repeating a similar counter-argument. Although ‘study the linguistic context’ might be a useful heuristic maxim, Bevir says, it does not express a necessary or sufficient condition for understanding. But Skinner is right, and one of the figures he has consistently identified as a formative inspiration, R. G. Collingwood, has already (in his work of the 1930s) shown why. What Collingwood calls his ‘logic of question and answer’ explains why the historian cannot answer his characteristic ‘intention’ question about past texts without knowing the context of problems to which authors think they are offering solutions. The study of context is neither ‘prior’ (as Bevir incorrectly supposes) nor ‘separate’ (as Skinner inaccurately says), but it is, as Skinner maintains, nevertheless impossible to grasp an author’s intention without it. This ‘logic of question and answer’ also explains why, in history, dismissing the study of context is in fact a pre-judgement of evidence yet unseen. (shrink)

It is a common statement in the most traditional views of the history of the philosophy of art to consider the nineteenth century as the moment of birth of the expressionist theory of art, a theory that ended pushing aside the already declining imitation theory of art. It is also usually understood that the expressionist theory defended that the essence of art was to express emotion, that the artist aim was to translate somehow emotions into artworks, and that these emotions (...) ended in some way reaching the audience or the public of the work of art that was contemplated, listened to, or read... -/- This explanation of art received a further development during the first half of the twentieth century by R. G. Collingwood among others, but was soon replaced by other theories that moved in a wider scope. Nevertheless Collingwood's approach to art continues being a reference for the reflection of many contemporary philosophers, although the general sense of their approach to his philosophy of art is mainly negative: it is more worried about criticizing Collingwood's view than about understanding it. -/- The aim of this exposition is not to defend Collingwood's explanation of art, but to show many important errors of interpretation that have become a common place in the objections that are made against his proposal. To accomplish it, I pretend to take a close look to the criticisms to his theory made by one of the most important exponents of the aesthetics of the analytical tradition, George Dickie. I have chosen him because he both summarizes and has contributed to extend quite well the general tone of the objections against Collingwood's account of art. These mainly focus on the understanding of art as imagination, on the definition of art as expression of emotion, and on the relation between these two approaches to art. By dismantling them, I hope to give some clues to help in a better understanding of these concepts in Collingwood's philosophy of art, not only because of the historical value that this might have, but because of the light that Collingwood's approach to art can throw upon contemporary reflections on the relation between art, emotion and value. (shrink)