R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History (original) (raw)

Collingwood, Scientism and Historicism

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2017

The philosophy of history is undergoing something of a revival. Much has happened since its heyday in the 1960s when methodological discussions concerning the structure of explanation in history and the natural sciences were central to the philosophical agenda. This introduction revisits Collingwood’s contribution to the philosophy of history, his views on the relation between science and history, and the possibility of historical knowledge suggesting his work is of enduring relevance to contemporary debates. It locates his contribution in the context of the hermeneutic tradition and locates his defence of the methodological autonomy of history in the context of recent debates concerning the relation between science and the history of the philosophy of science.

R. G. Collingwood's overlapping ideas of history

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2020

Does R. G. Collingwood’s meta-philosophical theory that concepts in philosophy are organized as “scales of forms” apply to his own work on the nature of history? Or is there some inconsistency between Collingwood’s work as a philosopher of history and as a theorist of philosophical method? This article surveys existing views among Collingwood specialists on the applicability of Collingwood’s “scale of forms” thesis to his own philosophy of history, especially the accounts of Leon Goldstein and Lionel Rubinoff, and outlines the obvious objections to such an application. These objections however are found to be answerable. It is shown that Collingwood did indeed think the scale of forms thesis should apply to the philosophy of history, and even that he identified the “highest” form in history as a kind of scientific research or inquiry. But it is not demonstrated that Collingwood identified the “lower” forms explicitly. An account is then provided of the three distinct forms that can be identified in Collingwood’s philosophy of history, and of the “critical points” by which (according to Collingwood’s philosophical method) lower forms are negated and incorporated by higher forms. But it is also explained that these forms are not neatly coterminous with the stages in Western philosophical thinking about history as Collingwood narrates them in The Idea of History.

History and idealism: Collingwood and Oakeshott

The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, 2015

The Erklären/Verstehen (explanation/understanding) distinction is often discussed in the context of the defence of the autonomy of the human sciences in the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy but it is rarely connected to the defence of the autonomy of historical explanations articulated by Collingwood and Oakeshott. Unlike earlier British idealists Collingwood and Oakeshott are concerned not in the metaphysics of time but in the methodology of history. This contribution locates their defence of the autonomy of historical understanding against the background of their commitment to a form of conceptual idealism. Against the background of an idealism which is purely conceptual (not causal or ontological) they argue that history is a form of experience with a distinctive method and subject matter. Both Collingwood and Oakeshott reject empiricist epistemology and argue that historical understanding is inferential not factual and that the inferences at work in history are different in kind from the inductive inferences at work in the natural sciences. But their rejection of the fact/value distinction presupposed by empiricist epistemology does not lead them to endorse any relativist conclusion concerning the possibility of knowing the past.

The myth of Collingwood's historicism

“The Myth of Collingwood’s Historicism”, Inquiry 2010, 53/6, pp. 627 – 641.

Abstract. 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.

The idea of a philosophy of history

Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice

It has recently been argued that the philosophical study of professional history constitutes a subfield of epistemology. Consequently, the philosophy of history is cast as only one particular species of the general study of the relationship between evidence and theory in scientific practice. This view is based upon an absolute separation between substantive and critical philosophy of history. By such a separation, substantive philosophy of history is dismissed as speculative metaphysics, while critical philosophy of history is vindicated as a respectable branch of epistemology. The attempt to delineate a strictly epistemological realm of history was a central part of the programme for analytically styled philosophy of history in the 1950–1970s era. This programme has been resurrected by contemporary empiricist trends. In this essay, I will argue against the basic ideas of this programme through a reassessment of Hayden White’s so-called narrativist philosophy of history. As I will show, criticizing the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology in history is an essential and important feature of White’s contribution to the philosophy of history. This feature has, I claim, been overshadowed by formalist interpretations of White’s ‘narrativism’. In conclusion, I argue that White’s concept of prefiguration will fundamentally question the viability of current attempts to develop a purely epistemological philosophy of history.

History as thought and action. The philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero and Collingwood

Rethinking History, 2014

This is a draft of an essay that has been revised and published in Rethinking History 18:4 (2014), 620-25 REVIEW ESSAY A story of philosophical 'relationships' History as Thought and Action. The philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero and Collingwood, Rik Peters, British Idealist Studies, Series 2: Collingwood, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2013, x + 429, £30 (hardback), ISBN 978-1845402440 Forty years ago Quentin Skinner effectively consigned vague claims about 'influence' to the dustbin of historiographical method. 'Influence' is, he said, often hard to establish, spurious, and oftener still it is more or less un-evidenced-excepting the 'evidence' of one thing resembling another (Skinner 2002, 75-9). In recent years specialists in the thought of R.G. Collingwood have mostly proved a little evasive on the question of his influences. James Connelly has contended, for instance, that 'the real question is that of affinity, not influence' (Connelly 1995, 92). There is perhaps a further reason why claims about influence are not always gladly heard. It is of course by no means defamatory to the power of his mind to describe Collingwood's philosophy as 'Kantian', as Giuseppina D'Oro (2002) consistently has-or as 'Hegelian', as Gary Browning (2004) has countered. But unless you are comparing him to Hegel or Kant, identifying an author as considerably influenced by anyone speaks against his originality and the independence of his mind, at least implicitly. At worst it might imply that his work is merely derivative. † Earlier Collingwood scholars were less delicate. In 1967 William M. Johnston devoted two chapters of The Formative Years of R.G. Collingwood to the influence (these were pre-† I have encountered this first hand. The first time was immediately after I had presented a paper on Collingwood's philosophy of history at an international conference a few years ago. The first respondent was an Italian friend, whose only question in response to my paper was whether I had been aware that Collingwood had translated Croce's La filosofia di Giambattista Vico. I said I had been. But there was no follow-up question. The implication was clear.

Is Collingwood a Historicist? Remarks on Leo Strauss's Critique of Collingwood's Philosophy of History (Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2017)

In this paper, I examine Strauss's critique of Collingwood's interpretive approach and argue that Strauss's accusation of historicism partly misses its target. While Collingwood can be said to be a " historicist " thinker insofar as he pursues the project of the German historicist tradition, he does not endorse the premises of radical historicism according to which all thought is historically relative. Although many of Strauss's arguments against interpretive historicism are valid, they do not apply to Collingwood's enterprise. In creating a dialogue between the two thinkers, I demonstrate that their respective theories of interpretation are as a matter of fact closer than they appear at first sight. Both philosophers defend the possibility of understanding past authors as they understood themselves, they maintain the importance of the quest for philosophical truth in interpreting the past texts and make the case for the necessity of history for philosophy.

Robin George Collingwood on Understanding the Historical Past

Hermeneia: Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory and Criticism, 2022

In this paper, we aim to demonstrate that Robin George Collingwood"s thesis on understanding the past through rethinking has hermeneutical consequences that can be instrumental in approaching and understanding philosophical texts. We are concerned not only with understanding the historical past, but also with understanding the wider context in which certain philosophical writings were thought and penned. Therefore, the hermeneutic dimension of Collingwood"s thought leads to some methodological principles, which are contrary to constructivist or deconstructivist assumptions of approaching written texts. Consequently, proceeding from the assumption that for Collingwood history itself is hermeneutic, we try to fulfill our intended objectives by supplementing the phenomenological method with hermeneutic analysis. The findings of the following study are hermeneutically relevant in that the past is incapsulated within the present and this implies the cancellation of the past-present divide and at the same time the actuality of (past) philosophical texts. We therefore propose the ruling principle that we rather understand the past from the perspective of the present than the present from the perspective of the past.

Collingwood and the Philosophy of History: The Metaphilosophical Dimension

Collingwood on Philosophical Methodology, 2019

In this essay, Ahlskog examines R. G. Collingwood’s conception of the philosophy of history and its metaphilosophical import. Ahlskog shows that Collingwood’s philosophy of history is simultaneously both a descriptive metaphysics of history and an elucidation of the relation between historical and philosophical thought. As a descriptive metaphysics, Ahlskog argues that Collingwood’s account has an irreducible and underexplored role for contemporary issues in the philosophy of history. The metaphilosophical import of Collingwood’s philosophy of history is unpacked through an elaboration of Collingwood’s ideas about the historicity of human experience and understanding. In conclusion, Ahlskog argues that the metaphilosophical dimension of Collingwood’s philosophy of history is integrally connected with the concept of history as self-knowledge.