Abstract
Collingwood’s account of re-enactment is often misunderstood as providing methodological guidance to historians. Williams’s chapter is perceptive in seeing through this erroneous interpretation. Williams is however very critical of Collingwood’s account of the relationship between philosophy and history. He reads Collingwood’s account of absolute presuppositions as embracing a form of ‘radical historicism’ and argues that, like many other philosophers who reject foundationalism, Collingwood tends to use the word ‘we’ in an evasive way, both in an inclusive sense “as implying universalistic preconditions on interpretation and intelligibility” and in a contrastive sense “under which ‘we’ here and now are distinct from others elsewhere and elsewhen, who lived in others and different intelligible human formations”. William’s chapter appropriately introduces this volume since the question concerning the nature of absolute presuppositions, and in what sense they can be said to be constitutive of the forms of inquiry which they make possible, is a central concern of this collection and is discussed by several contributors.
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[341] [Numbers in square brackets refer to the chapter’s original pagination—eds.]
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Notes
- 1.
G.J. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, Oxford University Press, 1958.
- 2.
‘The Life, Times, and Legacy of R.G. Collingwood’ in Philosophy, History and Civilization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R.G. Collingwood, eds. D. Boucher, J. Connelly & T. Modood, University of Wales, 1995.
- 3.
EPM: 209–14.
- 4.
A: 63 following. The whole chapter is very worthwhile.
- 5.
A: 69–70.
- 6.
IH: 9.
- 7.
IH: 288; compare A: 112 (about Nelson).
- 8.
‘Interpretation in History: Collingwood and Historical Understanding’ in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Verstehen and Human Understanding (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 41, Cambridge UP, 1996), 109–119.
- 9.
Page 114, Gardiner’s emphasis . There are passages in which it is clear that this is what Collingwood means, although his formulation is misleading: for example, IH: 282 “what kind of knowledge has [the historian]?: in other words, what must the historian do in order that he may know [his facts]?”—A similar distinction between method and constitution may be relevant to contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind (not primarily concerned with understanding the past) about the supposed distinction between “simulation theory” and “theory theory”.
- 10.
‘Philosophical Arguments,’ in Gilbert Ryle , Collected Papers, Vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), chap. 14.
- 11.
IH: 28–31. The same bias comes out in the very poorly considered attack on psychology in part II of Essay on Metaphysics, which apart from anything else offends against Collingwood’s own canons of how to read a text.
- 12.
A: 112.
- 13.
In this I side, in a famous disagreement, with Anscombe and against Austin . J.L. Austin, ‘Pretending’, and G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘Pretending’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 32 (1958), now in J.L. Austin Philosophical Papers, and G.E.M. Anscombe, The Collected Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, vol.2, respectively.
- 14.
Philosophy and History: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York, 1963), page 113; quoted by Patrick Gardiner, page 118.
- 15.
IH: 218.
- 16.
The title is owed to Robin Grandy.
- 17.
If one has an attachment to the idea of genius (as I think Collingwood did not, particularly), one can see this distinction as corresponding either to two theories of genius, or to two types of genius.
- 18.
IH: 269.
- 19.
A: 122.
- 20.
A: 33, 42.
- 21.
EM: 23 seq.
- 22.
Allowed at EM: 40.
- 23.
This point is made by Rex Martin in an article, ‘Collingwood’s Claim That Metaphysics is a Historical Discipline’, in Philosophy, History and Civilization, at page 207.
- 24.
EM: 49, 61–2.
- 25.
Quoted by Boucher, op. cit. note 36.
- 26.
There is a sparkling paragraph on this theme at EM: 169.
- 27.
EM: 70.
- 28.
This point does not entail the view, rejected by Martin, op. cit. page 216, that recovering or coming to know an absolute proposition is just an exercise of re-enactment.
- 29.
EM: 186.
- 30.
EM: 188.
- 31.
EM: 188.
- 32.
IH: 325.
- 33.
Chapter XVII, 172 seq.
- 34.
EM: 194.
- 35.
See Boucher, op. cit. note 42 for references.
- 36.
This is of course a fundamental Hegelian principle. Beyond this important point, I do not suppose that Collingwood was a Hegelian thinker, but to argue this would require a longer treatment, in particular of Collingwood’s understanding of progress , and the extent to which he was in some sense, like Hegel , a relativist.
- 37.
Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1958) was an early and influential example of this tendency.
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Williams, B. (2018). An Essay on Collingwood. 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_2
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