Abstract
Is philosophy continuous with science or does it have a distinctive domain of inquiry that differs from that of the special sciences? Collingwood claimed that philosophy has a distinctive subject matter and a distinctive method. Its distinctive subject matter is what he called the “absolute presuppositions” that govern the special sciences and its method consists in making these presuppositions explicit by showing that they are entailed by the questions asked in the special sciences. In this chapter the editors seek to provide a guide to the diverging interpretations of Collingwood’s claim that metaphysics is not the study of pure being but of the presuppositions that govern knowledge of reality. They argue that a reassessment of his contribution to philosophical methodology is timely in the light of the recent revival of interest in second-order questions concerning the role and character of philosophical analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
But please note that denying that natural science is a historical science is not the same as asserting that natural science is presuppositionless! That is a completely different claim, one that Collingwood would have adamantly rejected on the grounds that there is no such thing as presuppositionless knowledge. Every form of knowledge has its own explanandum, which is the correlative of its method and presuppositions. The explanandum of natural science is events, which are known through the experimental method. The explanandum of history is actions, which are known through the historical method. There is no explanandum and no knowledge from nowhere.
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Those interested in Collingwood’s philosophical methodology might also be interested in this volume’s elder sister “Collingwood and Philosophical Methodology”, a special issue of Collingwood and British Idealism Studies edited by Giuseppina D’Oro and James Connelly.
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Dharamsi, K., D’Oro, G., Leach, S. (2018). Introduction: The Armchair and the Pickaxe. In: Dharamsi, K., D'Oro, G., Leach, S. (eds) Collingwood on Philosophical Methodology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02432-1_1
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