Rg collingwood autobiography

In reminding philosophers that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, rests on presuppositions, Collingwood rehabilitates the older, Latin sense of the term scientia which is not synonymous with natural science but with “a body of systematic or orderly thinking about a determinate subject-matter” (EM 1998: 4). Also reprinted in Ryle 1990: 105–119.

Collingwood and the Idea of a Historical Psychology”, Theory & Psychology, 10(2): 147–170. On his return to Oxford Collingwood lectured on moral and political philosophy and worked at The New Leviathan (1942) which he saw as his contribution to the war effort. While there are additional epistemic obstacles in the way of understanding agents from a distant past, agents who we cannot engage in a live conversation, knowledge of the past is in principle achievable because understanding past agents is not a radically different task from that of understanding the thoughts of our contemporaries.

(IH 1993: 317)

The important question concerning any statement contained in an historical source “is not whether it is true or false, but what it means” (IH 1993: 260). To add to his self-imposed burden of overwork, his abilities as a linguistically versatile polymath (he was able to read scholarly work in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Latin, and Greek) were in great demand from 1928 onwards in his capacity as a Delegate to the Clarendon Press.

Partly as a result of serious overwork coupled with insomnia, Collingwood’s health went into decline from the early 1930s.

According to Mill’s way of drawing the distinction psychology is, like tidology and meteorology, an inexact (natural) science. Reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, 3–20.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198238812.001.0001

(EM 1998: 47)

Statements such as these have a strong historicist flavour. Distinguishing the explanandum of history, i.e., (mind), from that of science (matter/nature) is the true task of philosophy, a task that, for Collingwood, has to be distinguished from what he takes to be the pseudo problem of an enquiry into the causal relation holding between the mind and the body.

Empirically minded scientists presuppose that everything that happens is subject to natural laws which are invariant over time, for example, that water freezes at 0° Celsius under the reign of Queen Victoria as well as the time of Henry VIII. The task of the historian, as he saw it, is to transport us to another world by immersing oneself in the historical agent’s own context of thought.

3.3 The argument against methodological unity

Collingwood’s philosophy of history is a sustained attempt to delineate the subject matter of history and why this subject matter cannot be captured by adopting the methods of natural science.

These

are not the actions, in the widest sense of that word, which are done by animals of the species called human; they are actions in another sense of the same word, equally familiar but narrower, actions done by reasonable agents in pursuit of ends determined by their reason. When understood historically, therefore, the actions of past agents are explained more in the manner in which one understands the action of a motorist who stops at a traffic light (i.e., as abiding by a traffic regulation) than they are in the way in which an astronomer retrodicts the death of a star.

William Glen-Doepel (trans.), ed. However, a significant number of Collingwood’s manuscripts are still unpublished.