Robin george collingwood biography

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Philosophical analysis is concerned with a special kind of presupposition, one which has only one role in the logic of question and answer, namely that of giving rise to questions. As we have seen Collingwood later revisited the claim that philosophy has an autonomous domain of inquiry in An Essay on Metaphysics, where he reformulated it by saying that philosophy is not an ontological but a logical enquiry into the presuppositions which govern thought.

In spite of Collingwood’s attempts to qualify his commitment to the ontological argument Ryle continued to read Collingwood’s defence of the ontological proof at face value refusing to accept that the ontological proof could properly be interpreted as anything other than what it states on the label, i.e., an argument for the existence of God.

Collingwood, for his part, insisted on illustrating what the subject matter of philosophy is, by defending a highly controversial interpretation of what the ontological proof establishes. Also reprinted in Ryle 1990: 105–119. While An Essay on Metaphysics explained, in the most general terms, what presuppositional analysis is, The Idea of History (1946) and The Principles of History (1999) seek to uncover the presuppositions governing historical inquiry into the past.

(EPM 2005: 28–29)

In the traditional doctrine of classification intensional distinctions piggyback on extensional ones:

The logical doctrine of classification, as it stands in the ordinary text-books, implies a certain definite connexion between these two characteristics of the concept: namely that if a genus is distinguished into a certain number of species, the class of its instances can be correspondingly divided into an equal number of sub-classes.

Denying realism, so understood, is to deny that there can be any such thing as knowledge of pure being. 64–68.

Rotenstreich, Nathan, 1972, “Metaphysics and Historicism”, in Krausz 1972: 179–200.

Rubinoff, Lionel, 1966, “Collingwood and the Radical Conversion Hypothesis”, Dialogue, 5(1): 71–83.

Understanding actions historically requires understanding them more like responses to commands that may be followed or disregarded, than as instances (or counter instances) of empirical laws.

While there may be some overlap between adjacent species in this type of classification (the platypus is an animal that suckles its young like a mammal and lies eggs like a bird) these cases are “exceptional and limited” (EPM: 30).

Simply reading and translating an author’s written words does not necessarily convey the historical significance of those words and thoughts.

In 1939 he sailed around the Greek islands with a group of Rhodes scholars studying at Oxford—a journey memorably recollected and evoked in The First Mate’s Log (1940). In An Autobiography (1939) he contrasted realism not with immaterialism but with the commitment to presuppositionless knowledge or the realist view propounded by Cook Wilson and Prichard that “knowing makes no difference to what is known” (AA 2013: 44).

(EM 1998: 302)

A second passerby (who happens to be an Automobile Association man) proffers a different explanation: he holds up a loose cable and says “Look here, Sir, you are running on three cylinders” (EM 1998: 303). But the underlying conception of causation is a condition sine qua non for practising medicine.

In the aftermath of the scientific revolution this role was increasingly claimed by the most fundamental of the sciences: physics. Since the historian could not actually observe events as they took place, Collingwood claimed that he must necessarily use his imagination to reconstruct and understand the past. 8.