This paper seeks to clarify the precise sense in which Collingwood's “metaphysics without ontology” is a descriptive metaphysics. It locates Collingwood's metaphysics against the background of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics and then defends it against the claim that Collingwood reduced metaphysics to a form of cultural anthropology. Collingwood's metaphysics is descriptive not because it is some sort of historicised psychology that describes temporally parochial and historically shifting assumptions, but because it is a high level form of conceptual (...) analysis premised on the claim that ontological questions are actually internal ones and that metaphysics, understood as an attempt to answer external questions, is not a possible philosophical enterprise. This non-historicist reading of what it means to take the ontology out of metaphysics has broader implications which go beyond a scholarly debate in so far as it shows that it is possible to maintain objectivity in the absence of strong ontological underpinnings. (shrink)

This work combines two early pamphlets by F. H. Bradley , the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist movement. The first essay, published in 1874, deals with the nature of professional history, and foreshadows some of Bradley's later ideas in metaphysics. He argues that history cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny because it is not directly available to the senses, meaning that all history writing is inevitably subjective. Though not widely discussed at the time of publication, the pamphlet was influential (...) on historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood. The second pamphlet is Bradley's critique of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick was the first to propose the paradox of hedonism, which is the idea in ethics that pleasure can only be acquired indirectly. Published in 1877, this work is divided into three parts, treating Sidgwick's definitions, arguments, and his view of ethical science. (shrink)

THE PHILOSOPHY which I advocate is generally regarded as a species of realism, and accused of inconsistency because of the elements in it which seem contrary to that doctrine. For my part, I do not regard the issue between realists and their opponents as a funda- mental one; I could alter my view on this issue without changing my mind as to any of the doctrines upon which I wish to lay stress. I hold that logic is what is fundamental (...) in philosophy, and that schools should be characterized rather by their logic than by their metaphysic. My own logic is atomic, and it is this aspect upon which I should wish to lay stress. Therefore I prefer to describe my philosophy as "logical atomism," rather than as "realism," whether with or without some prefixed adjective. (shrink)

Ethics and jurisprudence are liable to the remark in common with logic. Almost every writer having taken a different view of some of the particulars which ...

v. 1. Critical essays.--v. 2. Collected essays, 1929-1968.

The concept of scientific history / Isaiah Berlin -- The limits of scientific history / W.H. Walsh -- The objectivity of history / J.A. Passmore -- Explanation in science and in history / C.G. Hempel -- The Popper-Hempel theory reconsidered / Alan Donagan -- The autonomy of historical understanding / Louis O. Mink -- Historical continuity and causal analysis / Michael Oakeshott -- Causal judgment in history and in the law / H.L.A. Hart and A.M. Honoré -- Causes, connections and (...) conditions in history / Michael Scriven -- The historical individual / A.C. Danto -- Methodological individualisms : definition and reduction / May Brodbeck -- Societal laws / Maurice Mandelbaum -- Determinism in history / Ernest Nagel. (shrink)

Why should modern philosophers read the works of R. G. Collingwood? His ideas are often thought difficult to locate in the main lines of development taken by twentieth-century philosophy. Some have read Collingwood as anticipating the later Wittgenstein, others have concentrated exclusively on the internal coherence of his thought. This work aims to introduce Collingwood to contemporary students of philosophy through direct engagement with his arguments. It is a conversation with Collingwood that takes as its subject matter the topics that (...) interested him 'philosophy and method, philosophy of mind, language and logic, the historical imagination, art and expression, action, metaphysics and life' and which still preoccupy us today. --the first introductory book on this major modern philosopher --includes critical investigation of his thought --there is no similar work available. (shrink)

This introductory text is written for students faced with the question "what is history?

This essay argues that R.G. Collingwood's remarks about genre are implausible, and that they stem, despite their apparent origin in his wider account of art, from his failure to take some of his own most important insights seriously enough. Some possible reasons for that failure are suggested; and it is shown that, once the relevant insights are given their proper weight, Collingwood's account commands the resources from which a plausible story about genre might have been constructed. To this extent, the (...) present essay constitutes a defence of Collingwood's philosophy of art. (shrink)

The classic logical positivist account of historical explanation, putting forward what is variously called the "regularity interpretation" (#Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation), the "covering law model" (#Dray, Laws and Explanation in History), or the "deductive model" (Michael #Scriven, "Truisms as Grounds for Historical Explanations"). See also #Danto, Narration and Knowledge, for further criticisms of the model. Hempel formalizes historical explanation as involving (a) statements of determining (initial and boundary) conditions for the event to be explained, and (b) statements of (...) general laws that imply that whenever events of the kind described in (a) occur, an event of the kind to be explained will take place. He admits that in practice historians rarely explain historical events in this way, but instead give only fragmentary "explanation sketches." Such sketches can, however, be "scientifically acceptable," providing it points to where "more specific statements" are to be found (351). An interesting aspect of the article is its "late" positivist, proto‑Kuhnian assertion that "the separation of 'pure description' and 'hypothetical generalization and theory construction' in empirical science is unwarranted" (356). But Hempel does not work out the wider implications of this important conclusion. It is also worth noting that he himself was not much interested in the philosophy of history; other authors took up his model and discussed it within that context. Usefully discussed by #Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:112‑17. (shrink)

This article discusses R. G. Collingwood’s account of re-enactment and Donald Davidson’s account of radical translation. Both Collingwood and Davidson are concerned with the question “how is understanding possible?” and both seek to answer the question transcendentally by asking after the heuristic principles that guide the historian and the radical translator. Further, they both agree that the possibility of understanding rests on the presumption of rationality. But whereas Davidson’s principle of charity entails that truth is a presupposition or heuristic principle (...) of understanding, for Collingwood understanding rests on a commitment to internal consistency alone. Collingwood and Davidson diverge over the scope of the principle of charity because they have radically different conceptions of meaning. Davidson endorses an extensional semantics that links meaning with truth in the attempt to extrude intensional notions from a theory of meaning. Since radical translation rests on a truth-conditional semantics, it rules out the possibility that there may be statements that are intelligible even though based on false beliefs. Collingwood’s account of re-enactment, on the other hand, disconnects meaning from truth, thereby allowing for the possibility of understanding agents who have false beliefs. The paper argues, first, that Davidson’s account of radical translation rests on inappropriately naturalistic assumptions about the nature of understanding, and that Davidson commits this error because he develops his account of radical interpretation in response to an epistemological question that is motivated by a skeptical concern: “how can we know whether we have provided the correct interpretation?” Second, that in the twentieth century far too much philosophizing has been driven by epistemological concerns that have obscured attempts to provide adequate answers to the sort of conceptual question with which Collingwood is concerned, namely: “what does it mean to understand?”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 87-101 [Access article in PDF] Collingwood on Re-Enactment and The Identity of Thought Giuseppina D'oro University of Keele Collingwood's The Idea of History is often discussed in the context of the issue of the reducibility/non-reducibility of explanations in the social sciences to explanations in the natural sciences. In the 1950s and 60s, following the publication of Hempel's influential article, "The Function (...) of General Laws in History,"1 many looked at Collingwood's defence of the autonomy of history as providing the appropriate conceptual resources to counter Hempel's claim that explanations in history and in the natural sciences share the same logical structure. Collingwood was recruited as an ally in a number of debates in analytical philosophy of history with a view to clarifying the nature of appropriately historical explanations and the proper subject matter of historical science. In this paper, I wish to consider Collingwood's account of historical understanding from a related but distinct perspective, that is, I wish to consider re-enactment from the perspective of Collingwood's (controversial) claim that thought stands outside time, and that it is because thought stands outside time that it is possible to understand the thoughts of other agents, including those of agents who lived in a distant past. Although Collingwood's account of re-enactment is developed in the context of his philosophy of history, it addresses some very general issues within the philosophy of mind. It is with Collingwood's approach to these general issues that the present paper is concerned: First, I explicate Collingwood's account of re-enactment against the background of his philosophy of mind and, second, attempt to show that one important goal of Collingwood's account of re-enactment is to undermine a certain type of scepticism about the possibility of sharing the thoughts of others, rather than provide a straightforward refutation of this sceptical position. While I believe Collingwood's claim that thought stands outside time to have important repercussions on how to understand [End Page 87] issues more closely related to the philosophy of history, I will not attempt, for reasons of space, to cash out these implications here.In The Idea of History2 the concept of re-enactment is expounded largely via an engagement with an imaginary objector. The position that Collingwood attributes to the imaginary objector can be preliminarily summarized as saying that the objector identifies thoughts with token acts of thinking which can be spatio-temporally located, rather than with the propositional content expressed by those token acts. It is because the objector holds thoughts to be token acts which can be spatio-temporally located that s/he denies that two agents can have or share one and the same thought. Collingwood's reply to the imaginary objector relies on a philosophy of mind that is developed elsewhere3 but whose key elements are presupposed by his discussion of re-enactment in The Idea of History, and essential to an understanding of Collingwood's position.4An important aspect of Collingwood's philosophy of mind concerns his understanding of what is meant by an 'object of thought': When I call a thing subjective I mean that it is or pertains to a subject or conscious mind. When I call it objective I mean that it is or pertains to the object of which such a mind is conscious. I do not call a real rose objective and an imaginary one subjective, or the molecules in it objective and the beauty of it subjective. A real rose I call real and an imaginary rose I call imaginary; and I call them both objective because they are the objects of a perceiving and imagining mind respectively. (SM, 11)5For the sake of clarity I shall refer to the subjective/objective distinction as used by Collingwood as subjective2 and objective2 and to the subjective/objective distinction against which it is contrasted as subjective1 and objective1. Objective1 means existing in... (shrink)

It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not (...) actions. It argues that Collingwood’s defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event. (shrink)

In this timely and wide-ranging study, Karsten Stueber argues that empathy is epistemically central for our folk-psychological understanding of other agents--that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy thesis.Empathy, (...) regarded at the beginning of the twentieth century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the plausible philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance.Crucial in this context is his defense of the assumption, very much contested in contemporary philosophy of mind, that the notion of rational agency is at the core of folk psychology. Stueber then discusses the contemporary debate between simulation theorists--who defend various forms of the empathy thesis--and theory theorists. In distinguishing between basic and reenactive empathy, he provides a new interpretive framework for the investigation into our mindreading capacities. Finally, he considers epistemic objections to empathy raised by the philosophy of social science that have been insufficiently discussed in contemporary debates. Empathy theorists, Stueber writes, should be prepared to admit that, although empathy can be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, there are certain limitations in its ability to make sense of other agents; and there are supplemental theoretical strategies available to overcome these limitations. (shrink)

The constructionist thesis of history states, in general, that the historian must construct a theory to explain the past. Some, including Leon Goldstein, attempt to push this formulation beyond a description of historical methodology. They argue that since the real past is inaccessible to present observation, the real past can have no relevance for historiography. The distinctions made between the present, the real past, and the historical past generate problems with the concepts of past and present knowledge, theoretical infrastructure and (...) experience, verification and truth, conflicting historical theories, and observation and knowledge. Goldstein's formulation of the constructionist thesis assumes the conflicting positions that experiential perception is paradigmatic of all methods of acquiring knowledge, and that knowledge is itself a kind of experience. As well as conflicting with commonsense views, his thesis is internally incoherent. (shrink)

This book argues that Collingwood developed a complete political philosophy of civilization. It also demonstrates that his philosophical work comprises a unity in which there is no fundamental discontinuity between his earlier and later writings.

R.G. Collingwood is not normally associated with analytic philosophy, neither negatively nor positively. He neither regarded himself, nor was regarded by his contemporaries and their successors, as an analytical philosopher. However, the story is more interestingly complex than this, both because Collingwood is one of the few pre-analytics in the UK who continues to be of interest to current analytical philosophers, especially in relation to the philosophy of art and history and his conception of metaphysics, and because he mounted a (...) critique of analytical philosophy in the years of its emergence. (shrink)

A critique of Collingwood's re-enactment concept.

Many philosophers have been interested in aesthetics, but Collingwood was passionate about art. His theories were never merely theoretical: aesthetics for him was a vivid, vibrant thing, to be experienced immediately in worked paint and in sculptured stones, in poetry and music. Art and life were no dichotomy for Collingwood - for how could you have one without the other? Works of art were created in and for the real world, to be enjoyed by real people, to enchant to enhance. (...) Aaron Ridley's fascinating introduction opens up the work of this most rewarding of aesthetic thinkers, tracing his thought from its philosophic origins through to its practical consequence and ethical implications. The man who saw art as 'the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind' had a sense of its urgent importance which we ignore at our peril today. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine Gadamer's criticism of Collingwood's re-enactment. A parallel concern is the evaluation of Collingwood's hermeneutics of history. Given that Collingwood can be read as a hermeneutic thinker, what is the impact of Gadamer's critique of re-enactment? My response to this question focuses on the dual significance of completeness for hermeneutics. The fore-conception of completeness, on the one hand, presupposes meaningfulness. The incompleteness of meaning, on the other hand, shows that the finite human can (...) never arrive at a perfect explanation. The fusion of horizons is created by the tension that exists between completeness and incompleteness. According to Gadamer, the lack of a clear distinction between the two notions of completeness leads Collingwood to a historicist position exemplified by re-enactment. I review Collingwood's books to demonstrate that, pace Gadamer, both notions of completeness are central to Collingwood's philosophy, guaranteeing the hermeneutical stance of his thought. However, what substantiates Gadamer's dissatisfaction with re-enactment is Collingwood's insufficient grasp of the difference between human historicity and the practice of professional history. I argue that while Collingwood is correct to indicate the inferential procedure of the writing of a political history, he nevertheless forgets that the historian is still a finite human being conditioned by historical situatedness. (shrink)

R G Collingwood is an important twentieth century historian, archaeologist and philosopher whose works are the subject of continued interest, analysis and study. There is an unquestionable need to support this research activity with the provision of a reference guide which is fully up-to-date, informed and authoritative. The Companion will therefore list all primary and secondary material relevant to the study of Collingwood in all his fields of expertise - historical theory, philosophy and archaeology. It will also provide a guide (...) to archive material relevant to his life, together with sources and locations. The resulting volume will provide an essential companion to the understanding of the life and thought of R G Collingwood. (shrink)

This book investigates the reality of the past by connecting arguments across areas which are conventionally discussed in isolation from each other. Breaking the impasse within the narrower analytic debate between Dummett’s semantic anti-realists and the truth value link realists as to whether the past exists independently of our methods of verification, it is argued, through an examination of the puzzles concerning identity over time, that only the present exists. Drawing on Lewis’s analogy between times and possible worlds, and work (...) by R.G. Collingwood, Oakeshott and Barthes, a new proposal is advanced, as to how realist elements of ersatz presentism may be combined with historical coherentism to uphold the legitimacy of discourse about the past. (shrink)

In his edition of The Idea of History Knox made use of parts of Collingwood's unfinished manuscript of The Principles of History, written during a voyage through the Dutch East Indies in 1938–1939. This manuscript, however, is not among Collingwood's manuscripts, available at the Bodleian Library at Oxford since 1978. It was therefore considered lost, but it has recently been discovered in the Electronics of Oxford University Press. Originally, it consisted of ninety pages containing finished chapters on "Evidence," "Action," and (...) "Nature and Action." The first chapter, the manuscript text of which has not been recovered, was included by Knox in The Idea of History under the title "Historical Evidence." He also made use of parts of chapter III. Before dealing with the content of The Principles of History, I discuss two questions: why Knox did not publish the complete manuscript, in spite of the fact that Collingwood explicitly gave his authorization for its publication, and why the manuscript was not finished, in spite of the fact that Collingwood himself placed a high value upon it. The Principles of History contains much that is informative and clarifying for some much debated and controversial aspects of Collingwood's philosophy of history. Examples are his discussion of the status of a philosophy of history, the interpretation of evidence, the nature of human action, the role of emotions, what is meant by the thought-side of history, the difference between history and biography, the relation between history and nature, and the autonomy of historical thought. The manuscript is of interest, too, because of the insight it offers into the way The Idea of History was edited by Knox. It makes it clear how Knox manipulated the text when editing the sections on "History and Freedom" and on "Hegel and Marx": in the latter he deleted an important paragraph, while in both he sometimes made changes in Collingwood's very words. (shrink)

In so far as Collingwood is branded an ‘idealist’, the corresponding assumption is that he subscribed to the broad themes associated with the ‘English idealists or Hegelians’; in so far as he is thought to have broken free from their pernicious influence he is regarded as a proto-Kuhn or Wittgenstein who saw the error of his early ways. This paper suggests that neither picture is fully accurate, and that while the figure of F.H. Bradley perhaps played a more significant part (...) in Collingwood’s philosophical development than is often recognised, his role was that of a spur or challenge to his thinking. Coming to terms with Bradley was a struggle throughout his philosophical career. I suggest that Collingwood took from Bradley the dual problematic of the method appropriate to philosophical thought and the tangled question of the nature of metaphysics. These were both problems which he wrestled with throughout his life, and Bradley’s work can be seen as setting the agenda for his thought on these matters. (shrink)