## 1. Biographical Sketch



R.G. Collingwood was born in 1889 at Cartmel Fell, Lancashire, at the
southern tip of Windermere. His father, W.G. Collingwood, was an
archaeologist, artist, and acted as John Ruskin's private
secretary in the final years of Ruskin's life; his mother was
also an artist and a talented pianist. When he was two years old the
family moved to Lanehead, on the shore of Coniston Water, close to
Ruskin's house at Brantwood.



Collingwood was taught at home until the age of thirteen when he went
to preparatory school and the following year to Rugby School. In 1908
he went up to University College, Oxford, to read *Literae
Humaniores*. He was elected as a Fellow of Pembroke College,
Oxford, while still taking his final examinations.



On beginning his philosophical studies in 1910 he came under the
influence of the Oxford realists, especially E.F. Carritt and John
Cook Wilson. Until around 1916 he was a professed realist; however,
his realism was progressively undermined by his close engagement with
continental philosophy, especially the work of Benedetto Croce and
Giovanni Gentile. This was partly the result of his friendship with
J.A. Smith, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy from 1910
to 1935. In 1913 he published an English translation of Croce's
*The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico*; he was later to
translate many other works by both Croce and Guido de Ruggiero. Both
Croce and de Ruggiero were personal as well as philosophical friends,
although his relationship with de Ruggiero was closer.



Much of Collingwood's early work was in theology and the
philosophy of religion, under the influence of "The Group"
or "Cumnor Circle", a gathering of Church of England
modernists. In 1916 he published an essay on "The Devil"
in a collection produced by this group, and also his first book
*Religion and Philosophy*.



At the same time Collingwood was engaged in practical archaeological
work, spending his summers from 1912 onwards directing excavations of
Roman sites in the north of England. Although he sometimes described
his archaeology as a hobby, he nonetheless became an authority on the
history and archaeology of Roman Britain, conducting many excavations,
writing hundreds of papers, and systematically working his way around
the country recording and transcribing Roman inscriptions.



During the First World War Collingwood applied for a commission in the
army but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. Having been a keen
cadet at Rugby School and an enthusiast for the National Service
League, this came as a blow. From January 1916 onwards Collingwood
spent most of his time living and working in London in the
Intelligence Section of the Admiralty; although he continued to see
pupils in Oxford weekly, he gave no lectures between 1916 and 1919. He
left the Admiralty in June 1919 and resumed lecturing in January 1920.
During his time at the Admiralty he was the main author of two book
length reports: *A Manual of Belgium and the Adjoining
Territories* (1918); and *A Manual of Alsace-Lorraine*
(1919). A spin off from this work was his entry on *Luxemburg*
in the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* (12th ed.,
1921).



In late 1919 Collingwood wrote an extensive survey of the history of
the ontological proof, together with an analysis of the argument. This
survey was given as a series of lectures in the early 1920s. He drew
on this material in some of his later work, especially in *Faith
and Reason* (1928), *An Essay on Philosophical Method*
(1933) and *An Essay on Metaphysics* (1940). In 1924
Collingwood wrote *Speculum Mentis*. This was a dialectic of
what he termed "forms of experience": art, religion,
science, history, and philosophy. During this period he was also
lecturing on ethics, Roman history, the philosophy of history, and
aesthetics: his *Outlines of a Philosophy of Art* (based on his
lectures) was published in 1925.



Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s Collingwood was also heavily
engaged in historical and archaeological work, publishing *The
Archaeology of Roman Britain* in 1930 and several editions of
*Roman Britain*. The culmination of this work was his survey of
Roman Britain in *Roman Britain and the English Settlements*
(1936) and his contribution to Tenney Frank's *Economic
Survey of Ancient Rome* (1937). 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. In
April 1931 he suffered complications arising from chicken pox and
began to suffer from high blood pressure. He was granted leave of
absence by the university; following his return, in the autumn of
1932, he began writing an important new book, regarded by many as the
pinnacle of his philosophical achievement--*An Essay on
Philosophical Method* (1933). This had its origins in the
methodological introduction to the lectures on moral philosophy he had
delivered annually throughout the preceding decade. The *Essay*
was a sustained investigation of the nature of philosophical reasoning
through an examination of the distinctive character of philosophical
concepts. Following publication of the *Essay*, Collingwood
focused his philosophical energies on the philosophy of history and
the philosophy of nature. The lectures he delivered at this time later
formed the basis of the posthumously published *The Idea of
History* (1946) and *The Idea of Nature* (1945).



In 1935 Collingwood succeeded J.A. Smith as Waynflete Professor of
Metaphysical Philosophy and moved from Pembroke to Magdalen College.
He delivered his inaugural lecture on *The Historical
Imagination* in October of that year. He had been elected as a
Fellow of the British Academy in 1934 and delivered a lecture on
*Human Nature and Human History* to the Academy in May 1936.
These two lectures were later incorporated into *The Idea of
History*.



In 1937 Collingwood wrote *The Principles of Art* (1938);
whilst correcting the proofs he suffered a stroke, the first of many
to come. From this time onwards he was conscious that he was writing
on borrowed time. His *An Autobiography* (1939) records his
determination to put on record an account of the work he hoped to do
but might not live to complete. During a recuperative voyage to the
Dutch East Indies in 1938-9 he wrote *An Essay on
Metaphysics* (1940) and began work on what he regarded as his
magnum opus, *The Principles of History* (not published until
1995). 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).
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. He wrote the book against a
background of increasingly debilitating strokes.



R.G. Collingwood died in Coniston on 9 January 1943; he was nearly 54.
He is buried in Coniston churchyard in an unassuming grave between his
parents and John Ruskin. He was succeeded in the Waynflete Chair by
Gilbert Ryle.


## 2. Metaphilosophy


### 2.1 Philosophical distinctions and the overlap of classes



Collingwood's first mature work, *An Essay on Philosophical
Method* (1933), is a substantial treatise in metaphilosophy which
seeks to delineate the subject matter and method of philosophical
analysis. Here Collingwood says that the true work of philosophy is
"the distinguishing of concepts ...coexisting in their
instances" (EPM 2005: 51). The moral philosopher, for example,
distinguishes between different kinds of good: the pleasant, the
expedient, and the right (EPM 2005: 41). When philosophers distinguish
between the pleasant, the expedient, and the right as species of the
good they are not sorting things into mutually exclusive classes. If
this were their goal then the philosophical distinction between the
pleasant, the expedient, and the right would imply that



> 
> 
> whatever is pleasant must therefore be both inexpedient and wrong;
> that whatever is expedient must be both wrong and unpleasant, and that
> whatever is right must be both unpleasant and inexpedient. (EPM 2005:
> 41)
> 
> 
> 



But this is clearly not the case because philosophers allow that one
and the same action may be brought under different descriptions
depending on whether it is motivated by desire (the pursuit of
pleasure), by self-interest (expediency) or by duty (the right).
Because philosophical distinctions bring objects under different
descriptions rather than sorting them into classes, they defy the
rules which apply to the relation between genera and species in the
traditional theory of classification (EPM: 31). In the traditional
theory of classification, the adjacent species of a genus tend to be
mutually exclusive. Natural history, for example, classifies organisms
into animals and vegetables, animals into vertebrates and
invertebrates, vertebrates into mammals, birds, reptiles, and so on.
These adjacent species tend to capture mutually exclusive classes (the
class of vertebrates is different from the class of invertebrates; the
class of animals is different from the class of vegetables). 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). Overlap of classes, on the other hand,
is a "regular" feature of philosophical distinctions.
(EPM: 36). Philosophical distinctions allow for *complete* not
merely partial overlap. It is not merely the case, for example, that
some actions may exemplify both the concept of expediency and that of
the right (in the way in which the platypus is both a mammal and a
bird or amphibians are both aquatic and terrestrial animals), but that
in principle any action which falls under one species of a
philosophical genus could also fall under its adjacent concept: the
class of actions which instantiate the principle of expediency could
therefore in principle be the very same as the class of actions which
instantiate the principle of duty. Collingwood's point when
claiming that the concepts of expediency and duty overlap goes beyond
the epistemic consideration that it is difficult to know a
person's motive in acting, whether they were motivated by duty
or by expediency; his point is rather that a philosophical distinction
is "a distinction without a difference, that is, a distinction
in the concepts without a difference in the instances" (EPM:
50). To say that philosophical distinctions are "distinctions
without a difference" is not derogatively to dismiss them as
insignificant pedantic distinctions, but to point out that
philosophically to disambiguate concepts is not the same activity as
sorting things into classes. To disambiguate the concept of love from
that of jealousy, (not Collingwood's example) is not the same as
sorting partners into the separate classes of loving and jealous ones.
By the same token to disambiguate the conception of the good into the
pleasant, the expedient, and the right is not the same as sorting
actions into those performed in the pursuit of pleasure,
self-interest, or duty. The distinction between the pleasant, the
expedient, and the right, (as with the distinction between love and
jealousy) is a distinction that philosophers would want to make even
if the world were such that actions motivated by duty necessarily
benefitted the agent so that the class of actions motivated by
self-interest or by duty would contain the very same members.
Philosophical distinctions are purely intensional distinctions to
which there may correspond no difference in the class of objects
falling under the concepts that philosophical analysis
disambiguates.



Concepts, Collingwood says, may be viewed from two perspectives, their
extension and their intension. From the point of view of their
extension a concept is "general" in so far as it gathers
under itself "the plurality of its individual instances".
From the point of view of their intension a concept is generic in so
far as it gathers "the plurality of its specific
differentiations":



> 
> 
> Thus the concept of colour unites all the individual colours of all
> individual coloured things into a class of which they are members; but
> it also unites the specific colours red, orange, yellow, green, and so
> forth into a genus of which they are the species. It may be convenient
> to refer to the former unification by saying that the concept is
> general, to the latter by saying that it is generic. (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. Each sub-class will comprise the instances of one
> specific concept; the totality of the sub-classes will comprise that
> of the generic concept... (EPM 2005: 29)
> 
> 
> 



Philosophical distinctions do not follow this logic because they do
not presuppose that the concepts the philosopher disambiguates capture
a specific set or class. The task of philosophical analysis precisely
is to distinguish concepts which coincide in their instances. When two
philosophical concepts coincide in their instances the thing which
exemplifies them is not a hybrid, as amphibians or the platypus are.
It is one thing seen from different perspective or brought under
different descriptions. So, for example, a song exemplifies the
concepts of music and poetry, but to say this is not the same as
saying that it is part music and part poetry in the way in which a
centaur is part man and part horse or the platypus is part mammal and
part oviparous. Aesthetic distinctions between poetry and music, like
moral ones, are distinctions which bring the whole of the object, not
a part of it, under a different description. Philosophical
distinctions are purely intensional distinctions between distinct
concepts or genera. But they are not for this reason inconsequential.
Just as those who fail to disambiguate the concept of love from that
of jealousy will be not be able to comprehend how a loving partner
need not be jealous so those who fail to disambiguate the concept of
the good will not be able to comprehend how the pursuit of what is
morally right may not be in one's self-interest.



Collingwood's account of the nature of overlap of classes in
philosophical distinctions informs his philosophy of mind and his
approach to the question concerning the nature of the relation holding
between the mind and the body. The distinction between the concept of
mind and the concept of body (or matter) is a philosophical
distinction. The task of the philosopher of mind is to distinguish
between concepts which coincide in their instances and to disambiguate
what one means, for example, when speaking about the human being
*qua* biological being and *qua* person. When
philosophers so distinguish between mind and body, they do not do this
in the manner of natural scientists who sort animals into the classes
of mammals and oviparous. Minded beings are not hybrids who are part
mind and part body in the way in which the minotaur is part man and
part horse:



> 
> 
> Man's body and man's mind are not two different things,
> but the same thing... as known in two different ways. Not a part
> of man, but the whole of man is body in so far as he approaches the
> problem of self-knowledge by the methods of natural science. Not a
> part of man, but the whole of man is mind, in so far as he approaches
> the problem of self-knowledge by expanding and clarifying the data of
> reflection. (NL 1992: 11)
> 
> 
> 



The philosophical distinction between the concepts of mind and body is
not to be confused with a real or metaphysical distinction as argued
by Descartes. The claim that mind is a sui generis concept or category
that is distinct from that of the body does not entail that it could
exist apart from the body. Philosophical distinctions are intensional
distinctions with no deep ontological implications. But the fact that
they are not meant to cut reality at the joints does not mean that
they do not carry any weight: those who fail to make the distinction
between the concepts of mind and body are bound to fail to see a
distinction between the normative/rationalizing explanations of
actions and the descriptive/nomological explanation of events and
espouse the view that the mind can be studied and understood in the
same way as matter, by invoking causal laws. It is no surprise,
therefore, that much of Collingwood's later philosophy, his
philosophy of history in particular, is devoted to defending the
autonomy of the explanatory practices of history (which he took to be
the science of mind) from those of natural science. 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. The true question concerning the relation
between the mind and the body



> 
> 
> ... is the relation between the sciences of the body, or natural
> sciences, and the sciences of the mind; that is the relation enquiry
> into which ought to be substituted for the make-believe inquiry into
> the make-believe problem of "the relation between body and
> mind". (NL 1992: 2.49/11)
> 
> 
> 



An implication of the ubiquitous nature of the overlap of classes is
that the justification for the employment of philosophical concepts
cannot be based on empirical observation because philosophical
distinctions cannot be empirically verified. A geologist's
classification of rocks into sedimentary and crystalline, for example,
is based on the observable features of the two types of rocks and is
empirically verifiable; by contrast philosophical distinctions such as
those between the expedient and the right, mind and body, cannot be
similarly justified precisely because they are distinctions in the
concepts without differentiation in the instances. The justification
for the deployment of philosophical concepts and distinctions lies in
the fact that they enable us to bring reality under different
descriptions and view it from different angles, that they enable one,
for example, to judge a work of art to be aesthetically beautiful and
yet morally reprehensible.



In his later philosophy Collingwood will abandon the terminology of
the overlap of classes, but the commitment to the view that
philosophical distinctions are "distinctions without a
difference", and that the task of philosophical analysis is to
distinguish between concepts which coincide in their instances remains
even after this terminology is left behind. In his second
metaphilosophical treatise *An Essay on Metaphysics* (1940) he
sets out to disambiguate the different senses of the term
"cause". The term cause can be used, in what he refers to
as sense I to mean "reason" or "motive". In
sense I



> 
> 
> that which is caused is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and
> responsible agent, and causing him to do it means affording him a
> motive for so doing. (EM 1998: 285)
> 
> 
> 



This is the way in which the term is used in the historical sciences
or sciences of the mind. The term "cause" is also used in
what he refers to as sense II to denote an antecedent condition that
agents have the power to produce or prevent. In this sense a cause
is



> 
> 
> an event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can
> produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be. (EM 1998:
> 296-7)
> 
> 
> 



The term cause is used in sense II in the practical sciences of
nature, sciences such as medicine and engineering. Finally, the term
cause is also employed in sense III in the theoretical sciences of
nature where



> 
> 
> that which is caused is an event or state of things and its cause is
> another event or state of things such that (a) if the cause happens or
> exists, the effect must happen or exist even if no further conditions
> are fulfilled (b) the effect cannot happen or exist unless the cause
> happens or exists. (EM 1998: 285-86)
> 
> 
> 



The main difference between sense II and sense III of the term is that
whereas in the practical sciences of nature the cause of an event is
an antecedent state of affairs considered from the point of view of an
interest in controlling and manipulating the natural environment, in
the theoretical sciences of nature the causes of natural events are
viewed independently of any impact that agents can have on the natural
environment: a cause in sense III is unconditional. The key difference
between sense I, on the one hand, and sense II and III on the other,
is that in sense II and III a cause is an antecedent condition,
whereas in sense I it is a logical ground. When one explains an
agent's intention in acting by ascribing the agent a motive or
reason, the action is explained not by invoking something that went on
before (an antecedent condition in the form of an inner psychological
process) but the motive which rationalises it. Conflating sense I with
either sense II or III is to conflate normative/rationalizing with
causal explanations thereby also failing to grasp the distinction
between their respective explananda: actions and events. The
distinction between the different senses of causation, like the
distinction between the expedient and the right, is not a distinction
between separate classes of things; it is a distinction between
concepts that may coincide in their instances.


### 2.2 Presuppositional analysis



Collingwood returned to the question of the role of philosophical
analysis in his second metaphilosophical treatise, *An Essay on
Metaphysics* (1940). While the commitment to the view that
philosophy disambiguates concepts that coincide in their instances
persists, Collingwood presents the role of philosophical analysis in a
different way, by saying that philosophy's task is to uncover
the presuppositions of thought. This change of emphasis, as we shall
see, is at least in part motivated by an attempt to present his
metaphilosophical views in a language to which the emerging school of
analytic philosophy would have been more receptive and to engage in a
dialogue with A.J. Ayer's logical positivist critique of
metaphysics.



The task of philosophy, Collingwood claims in *An Essay on
Metaphysics*, is not to assert *propositions* in answers to
questions but to uncover *presuppositions*. Philosophy is
therefore concerned not with propositions but with presuppositions.
Propositions are answers to questions. For example, the proposition
"This is a clothes line" answers the question "What
is that thing for?" (EM 1998: 24). Presuppositions, on the other
hand give rise to questions. When one asks, "What is that thing
for?" one must presuppose "that it is 'for'
something" (EM 1998: 26). Without any presuppositions the
question would not arise.



Presuppositions differ from propositions in one fundamental respect:
propositions have truth-values. They are asserted as either true or
false. Presuppositions, on the other hand lack truth values; they are
neither true nor false. This is because they do not fulfil their role
(that of giving rise to questions) in virtue of being true or false.
Just as the validity of an inference does not depend on whether the
premises from which the inference is drawn are true or false, so the
"logical efficacy" (EM 1998: 27) of a presupposition,
i.e., its power to give rise to a question, does not depend on the
presupposition being either true or false, or even on being believed
to be true or false. This consideration, Collingwood says,



> 
> 
> is a matter of common knowledge in scientific thinking; where it is
> common and even profitable to argue from suppositions we know to be
> false, or which we believe to be false, or concerning which we have
> neither knowledge nor belief as to whether we are false or true. These
> doubts or negations in no way affect the validity of the argument. (EM
> 1998: 28)
> 
> 
> 



Whether a statement is a "proposition" or a
"presupposition" is determined not by its content but by
the role that the statement plays in the logic of question and answer.
If its role is to answer a question, then it is a proposition and it
has a truth-value. If its role is to give rise to a question, then it
is a presupposition and it does not have a truth-value. Some
statements can play different roles. They may be *both*
propositional answers to questions *and* presuppositions which
give rise to questions. For example, that an object is for something,
that it has a function may be a presupposition which gives rise to the
question "what is that thing for?", but it may also be an
answer to a question if the statement has the role of an assertion.
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. Collingwood calls
these presuppositions "absolute". Absolute presuppositions
are foundational assumptions that enable certain lines of questioning
but are not themselves open to scrutiny. The three senses of causation
discussed above are examples of absolute presuppositions which
structure different forms of inquiry. A physician, for example,
absolutely presupposes sense II of causation, according which a cause
is



> 
> 
> an event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can
> produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be. (EM 1998:
> 296-7)
> 
> 
> 



*Qua* practical scientist of nature, the physician absolutely
presupposes a handle or manipulability conception of causation which
makes it possible to intervene in nature to achieve certain intended
results, i.e., to restore health. This sense of causation is at work
in statement such as "The cause of malaria is the bite of a
mosquito" (EM 1998: 299) or "the cause of a man's
sweating is a dose of aspirin" (EM 1998: 299). The
presupposition is absolute because it could not be questioned without
at the same time undermining the kind of inquiry it makes possible.
Absolute presuppositions in this respect differ from relative
presuppositions. A physician prescribes a dose of aspirin on the
assumption it will cause a patient to break into a sweat. This
presupposition is relative because it could potentially be overthrown
by future research. But the underlying conception of causation is a
condition *sine qua non* for practising medicine. It is these
absolute presuppositions that philosophy seeks to uncover by
regressing from propositional answers to the questions they are
answers to, and from the questions to the presuppositions which must
be made for the questions to arise.



Collingwood's denial that absolute presuppositions have truth
values informs a commitment to a kind of explanatory pluralism
according to which the choice between different kinds of explanation
does not depend on whether they capture pure being but on whether they
are fit for purpose. He illustrates this explanatory pluralism by
imagining a scenario in which a car stops while driving up a steep
hill. As the driver stands by the side of the road a passerby, who
happens to be a theoretical physicist offers his help. The car, he
explains, has stopped because



> 
> 
> the top of a hill is farther removed from the earth's centre
> than its bottom and ... consequently more power is needed to take
> the car uphill than to take her along the level. (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). The first explanation invokes
the sense of causation that belongs to the theoretical sciences of
nature, sense III. The second explanation invokes the sense of
causation that belongs to the practical sciences of nature, sense II.
The choice between these explanations, for Collingwood is determined
by the nature of the question asked. As he puts it:



> 
> 
> If I had been a person who could flatten out hills by stamping on them
> the passerby would have been right to call my attention to the hill as
> the cause of the stoppage; not because the hill was a hill but because
> I was able to flatten it out. (EM 1998: 303)
> 
> 
> 



This scenario illustrates that there are different explanations,
corresponding to different senses of causation, each answering a
different kind of question. When the different senses of causation are
disambiguated, then it becomes clear that there is no conflict between
the explanation of the theoretical physicist and that of the car
mechanic, because they answer different kinds of questions, questions
which differ because they are entailed by different absolute
presuppositions. Explanations genuinely conflict with one another only
if they provide answers to the same question, but they do not if they
are answering different questions. The task of presuppositional
analysis is to undo the conceptual knots in which our thoughts get
tangled when we mix and match answers of one kind with questions of
another by failing to see the entailment relations which hold between
presuppositions, the question to which they give rise, and the sort of
propositional answers which address those questions:



> 
> 
> In unscientific thinking our thoughts are coagulated into knots and
> tangles; we fish up a thought out of our minds like an anchor foul of
> its own cable, hanging upside-down and draped in seaweed with
> shellfish sticking to it and dump the whole thing on deck quite
> pleased with ourselves for having got it up at all. Thinking
> scientifically means disentangling all this mess, and reducing a knot
> of thoughts in which everything sticks together anyhow to a system or
> series of thoughts in which thinking the thoughts is at the same time
> thinking the connexions between them. (EM 1998: 22-23)
> 
> 
> 



The logical inquiry into the connections holding between
presuppositions, questions and answers is the true task of conceptual
analysis in metaphysics, a task that must replace metaphysics
traditionally understood as the study of pure being. There is no such
thing as knowledge of pure being because there can be no
presuppositionless knowledge and there can be no presuppositionless
knowledge because all knowledge is pursued in answer to questions and
no question could arise if no presuppositions were made. The study of
reality under the different aspects enabled by the adoption of
different presuppositions is not an ontological but a logical enquiry
and metaphysics, so understood is, a "metaphysics without
ontology" (EM 1998: 18).



Failure to recognise that knowledge rests on presuppositions
encourages the belief that pure being is a possible object of
knowledge. Traditionally it was metaphysics that was deemed to be the
science of pure being. In the aftermath of the scientific revolution
this role was increasingly claimed by the most fundamental of the
sciences: physics. If Collingwood's claim that metaphysics
should take the form of a logical enquiry into presuppositions is
right, then there is no contest between metaphysics and physics or
more generally between philosophy and (natural) science because no
form of knowledge can claim the title of science of pure being.
Philosophy does not conflict with natural science because it does not
advance claims about the nature of reality but about the
presuppositions under which all sciences, including natural science,
operate. Nor is there conflict between (natural) science and other
forms of knowledge because different forms of knowledge answer
different kinds of questions, questions which arise from different
presuppositions. 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). The use of "science"
to mean "*natural* science" is a slang use of the
term (EM 1998: 4) that has that is symptomatic of the prevalence of
scientism, the belief that only scientific knowledge is a form of
knowledge and that science can answer all questions.



Collingwood's account of absolute presuppositions generates an
interesting angle on the question of scepticism concerning induction.
Hume had argued that inductive inferences rely on the principle of the
uniformity of nature. If it is true that the future resembles the
past, then inferences such as "the sun will rise tomorrow"
are inductively justified. However, since the principle is neither a
proposition about matters of fact nor one about relations of ideas the
proposition "nature is uniform" is an illegitimate
metaphysical proposition and inductive inferences lack justification.
The principle of the uniformity of nature, Collingwood argues, is not
a proposition, but an absolute presupposition, one which cannot be
denied without undermining empirical science. As it is an absolute
presupposition the notion of verifiability does not apply to it
because it does its job not in so far as it is true, or even believed
to be true, but in so far as it is presupposed. The demand that it
should be verified is nonsensical and the question that Hume ask does
not therefore arise:



> 
> 
> ...any question involving the presupposition that an absolute
> presupposition is a proposition, such as the question "Is it
> true?" "What evidence is there for it?" "How
> can it be demonstrated?" "What right have we to presuppose
> it if it can't?", is a nonsense question. (EM 1998:
> 33)
> 
> 
> 



Similar considerations, as we shall see later, are invoked by
Collingwood against Ayer's principle of verifiability.


### 2.3 The "radical conversion" hypothesis



There is clearly continuity between Collingwood's account of the
nature of philosophical distinctions, as developed in *An Essay on
Philosophical Method* and his later claim in *An Essay on
Metaphysics* that the role of presuppositional analysis is to undo
the conceptual knots in which unsystematic thinking gets tangled. His
attempt to disambiguate the different senses of causation in *An
Essay on Metaphysics* seems to be engaging in a task akin to what
in *An Essay on Philosophical Method* he described as the
distinguishing of concepts that coincide in their instances. Yet a
major issue of contention in Collingwood scholarship concerns whether
Collingwood's later work, beginning with *An Essay on
Metaphysics*, historicized his earlier conception of the role of
philosophical analysis. This is because *An Essay on
Metaphysics* contains a fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand it
presents presuppositional analysis as the task of regressing from
propositional answers to questions and from questions to
presuppositions. This is a logical task aimed at putting order in our
thoughts and getting rid of conceptual confusions. On the other hand,
it presents presuppositions as historical beliefs thereby suggesting
that the goal of presuppositional analysis is not so much to get rid
of conceptual confusion as to describe what certain people believed in
different periods of time. Metaphysics, Collingwood says



> 
> 
> is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been
> made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that
> occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that occasion
> or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of
> thinking. (EM 1998: 47)
> 
> 
> 



Statements such as these have a strong historicist flavour. This
ambiguity exposes a tension between two different conceptions of the
role of philosophical analysis. On the first conception the task of
philosophy is to delineate the subject matters of different forms of
knowledge and denounce the encroachment of one form of knowledge on
the subject matter of another. The emphasis is on explanatory
pluralism, *not* historical relativism. The defence of the
autonomy of historical explanation in *The Idea of History*,
for example, implies that the role of philosophical analysis is to
identify the distinctive presuppositions of history and to distinguish
them from those of natural science with a view to combating scientism.
The second conception, by contrast, places the emphasis on historical
relativism rather than explanatory pluralism. It is this second
conception of the role of philosophical analysis in *An Essay on
Metaphysics* that has led to the view that Collingwood's
later metaphilosophy differs substantially from his earlier view of
the role of philosophical analysis, a view sometimes referred to as
"the radical conversion hypothesis". The hypothesis of a
historicist turn was first advanced by Malcolm Knox in the editorial
introduction to the posthumously published *The Idea of
History*. It was also endorsed by early commentators such as A.
Donagan (1962 and 1972), Toulmin (1972) and N. Rotenstreich (1972).
The expression "radical conversion hypothesis", however,
was actually coined by Rubinoff (1966) who alongside Mink (1969)
rejected it as an inadequate description of Collingwood's
position. This is still a live debate in Collingwood scholarship,
although more recent studies (Martin 1989; Modood 1989; Connelly 1990;
Oldfield 1995; Beaney 2005; D'Oro 2002, 2010) tend to emphasise
the unity rather than discontinuity in Collingwood's
metaphilosophical approach.


### 2.4 The ontological argument and the correspondence with Ryle



The question concerning the relation between Collingwood's two
metaphilosophical treatises and whether the conception of the role of
philosophical analysis articulated in *An Essay on Metaphysics*
is continuous with that described in *An Essay on Philosophical
Method* is further complicated by the fact that *An Essay on
Philosophical* Method contains a defence of the ontological
argument that appears to be at odds with Collingwood's later
claim that metaphysics is a logical, not an ontological inquiry and
with the assertion that presuppositional analysis is a form of
"metaphysics without ontology". The ontological proof is
normally regarded as the pinnacle of metaphysical knowledge, knowledge
that is both necessary (as a priori knowledge) and has existential
import (as empirical knowledge). Collingwood's allegiance to the
ontological proof in *An Essay on Philosophical Method* would
therefore seem to provide further evidence for the hypothesis of a
rift between Collingwood's earlier and later conception of
philosophical analysis because it seems to be advancing the sort of
robust metaphysical claims which Collingwood's later conception
of metaphysics is keen to leave behind. However, the detail of
Collingwood's discussion of the ontological proof suggests that
he had a rather unorthodox understanding of what the ontological proof
establishes (D'Oro 2002). Paradoxical as this might sound, he
did not seem to think that the ontological proof establishes any
substantive ontological conclusions and that it yields the sort of
metaphysical knowledge he later explicitly claimed to be impossible.
His concern with the ontological proof was intricately connected with
an attempt to delineate the subject matter of philosophical analysis,
not the existence of metaphysical entities. God, for Collingwood, is
"that which we are thinking about when we are thinking
philosophically" (Collingwood's 1935 private letter to
Ryle, published in the 2005 edition of *An Essay on Philosophical
Method*, EPM 2005: 257). This claim may be clarified by saying
that philosophical concepts are not contingently instantiated in an
empirical class of objects (as we have seen, they do not sort things
into classes); they are necessarily instantiated in the forms of
judgement or inference which they make possible. For example, the
concept of the good, *qua* expediency, is necessarily
instantiated in hypothetical or instrumental imperatives and the
concept of mind is necessarily instantiated in judgements which
explain actions *qua* expression of thought. This is the kernel
of truth that, according to Collingwood, is worth restating in the
ontological argument.



Collingwood's discussion of the ontological argument in *An
Essay on Philosophical Method* gave rise to a lively epistolary
exchange with Ryle (the exchange is published in the 2005 edition of
*An Essay on Philosophical Method*). The correspondence was
triggered by the publication of an article in *Mind* by Ryle
(1935) which attacked Collingwood's sympathetic appraisal of the
ontological proof on the grounds that there are no such things as
propositions which are both necessary and existential, i.e., no such
things as metaphysical propositions, like the one asserting the
necessary existence of God. Collingwood replied to Ryle in a private
letter by claiming that that there is a third kind of proposition,
philosophical propositions, which feature philosophical concepts,
propositions such as "Mind exists" or "Matter
exists". Such propositions are necessary but not merely
hypothetical because the philosophical concepts whose existence they
assert are necessarily instantiated in the judgements employed by the
practitioners of a given science. "Mind exists" in so far
as one explains actions by means of rationalisations, rather than
nomological explanations; the concept of mind is embedded in the kind
of judgement or inference that it makes possible. The main bone of
contention in the correspondence between Ryle and Collingwood was
therefore not the ontological argument in its traditional form, but
whether or not philosophy has an autonomous domain of inquiry, i.e.,
whether there are distinctive philosophical concepts, (concepts which
allow for complete extensional overlap). 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. Be this as
it may, the misunderstandings between Collingwood and Ryle show how
very difficult it must have been for Collingwood to translate his
insights in the language of the burgeoning school of analytic
philosophy. In spite of the misunderstandings it involves, the
Collingwood-Ryle correspondence reveals some of the issues which truly
troubled philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century and
offers a fascinating window onto the origins of analytic philosophy
(D'Oro 2000; Vrijen 2006).


### 2.5 The metaphilosophical battle with Ayer



In the debate with Ryle which unfolded on the pages of *Mind*
and in the private correspondence Collingwood had tried to defend the
claim that there is a distinctive kind of proposition which captures
the subject matter of philosophy, but his attempt to capture the
distinctive subject matter of philosophical analysis was dismissed by
Ryle as being of a piece with a dusty old metaphysics. The drastic
change of terminology in *An Essay on Metaphysics* is at least
in part an attempt to defend the claim that philosophy has a
distinctive subject matter different from both that of the exact and
the natural sciences, but to do so in a way that would not lend itself
to the kind of misunderstanding that led Ryle to dismiss
Collingwood's metaphilosophical vision as belonging to an
idealist metaphysics of the sort that analytic philosophy wanted to
leave behind. This terminological change put Collingwood in a better
position to engage with the revival of empiricism at the hands of A.J.
Ayer. In *Language Truth and Logic* (1936) Ayer revitalised
Hume's critique of metaphysics by invoking the principle of
verifiability, according to which propositions are meaningful insofar
as they are empirically verifiable. Propositions which are not
empirically verifiable are nonsense unless they are tautologies. As
far as Collingwood was concerned Ayer's revival of the Humean
fork had unpalatable metaphilosophical implications because it
entailed that to be meaningful the claims of philosophy must be either
empirically verifiable, as the propositions of natural science, or
analytic truths, as the propositions of exact science. *An Essay on
Metaphysics* is a pointed attack on the metaphilosophical
implications of this claim. Ayer's commitment to the view that
there are only two types of legitimate propositions, empirical and
analytic, was, for Collingwood, based on a failure to acknowledge that
statements can play different roles in the logic of question and
answer. Some statements are answers to questions and, in so far as
their role is to answer questions, they are truth evaluable. But some
statements have a different role, namely, to give rise to questions
and they perform this role not in so far as they are true or false,
but in so far as they are presupposed. As such they are not truth
evaluable, because they are not asserted as propositional answers to
questions. Statements such as "a cause is an event by producing
or preventing which one can produce or prevent that whose cause it is
said to be" (sense II of causation) is not asserted by the
philosopher as a proposition. What the philosopher asserts is not
"causes in sense II exist or are true of an inquiry independent
reality" (which would be an illegitimate metaphysical
proposition) but rather "causes in sense II are absolutely
presupposed in the practical sciences of nature". Philosophy
yields not first order knowledge but second order knowledge or
understanding of the presuppositions on which knowledge rests.
Ayer's classification of propositions along the lines of the
Human fork conflates presuppositions with propositions and, as a
result, fails to acknowledge that philosophy has a distinctive subject
matter, namely absolute presuppositions, and a distinctive role, to
detect presuppositions. Absolute presuppositions are not reducible
either to the propositions of the exact or those of the natural
sciences. Nor are they ruled out as meaningless propositions by the
principle of verifiability because, since they are not propositions,
the notion of verifiability does not apply to them.


### 2.6 Realism and idealism



Collingwood is often referred to as a British idealist, but his
allegiance to idealism was in large measure a response to the Oxford
realism he had imbibed as a student and continued to profess until
around 1916. Hence he tended to be rather wary of the label
"idealist", and in his correspondence with Gilbert Ryle he
explicitly rejected it (EPM 2005: 256). However, in his lectures
on Central Problems of Metaphysics (1935) he tentatively propounded a
form of what he termed "objective idealism." But,
nonetheless, as in his response to Ryle, he continued to rail against
those who sought to pin his position down to an "ism",
once remarking that "I am not going to be pigeon-holed into one of
your neat categories. Philosophy is a process of inquiry, not dogmatic
positions" (Hector 2000).



This reluctance is probably due to the fact that idealism is most
often identified with immaterialism and he would not have wished his
criticism of realism to be interpreted as resting on a commitment to
the claim that the real is ideal or that mind is causally responsible
for the existence of reality. If the contrast between idealism and
realism is understood as one between two metaphysical views concerning
the ontological constitution of reality (is it mental? Is it
material?) Collingwood had nothing to contribute to the debate between
realists and idealists; he would have regarded it as belonging to
metaphysics as the study of pure being, not as metaphysics understood
as a form of presuppositional analysis. 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). Denying realism, so
understood, is to deny that there can be any such thing as knowledge
of pure being. Since all knowledge takes the form of answers to
questions, and all questions rest on presuppositions, knowledge
necessarily has presuppositions. Collingwood's critique of
realism therefore takes Kant's criticism of the possibility of
knowing things as they are in themselves a step further. Kant did not
deny that talk about knowledge of things as they are in themselves is
coherent; he simply claimed that this sort of knowledge is unavailable
to us. Collingwood's critique of realism, by contrast, denies
that there is any such thing as presuppositionless knowledge.
Presuppositionless knowledge is not a kind of knowledge that it is not
possible for us to acquire but may be available to another being, such
as God: the idea of presuppositionless knowledge involves an oxymoron
because all knowing involves presuppositions.


## 3. History and Science


### 3.1 The historical past and the presuppositions of historical inquiry



*An Essay on Metaphysics* contains a general statement of
Collingwood's metaphilosophy and his view that metaphysics is
not an ontological inquiry into pure being but a logical inquiry that
takes the form of presuppositional analysis. 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.
Collingwood's philosophy of history asks the question:
"what are the presuppositions that govern the historical
understanding of the past?" and "what does it mean to
understand the past *historically*?" The nature of
Collingwood's concern with the past is not metaphysical. He is
not advancing a theory concerning the nature of time, whether, for
example, it is ever-present or a growing block. Nor is it primarily an
epistemological concern with the question of how one acquires
knowledge of the past, given that it is not available for observation,
although he does address some epistemological questions. The nature of
his concern with the nature of the past is first and foremost a
conceptual concern with the question "What is the historical
past? What does it mean to understand the past
*historically*?"



The *historical* past is the past understood
*historically*, i.e., from the perspective of certain
presuppositions, presuppositions that give rise to certain kinds of
questions, questions that are distinctive of historical inquiry and
differ from those of natural science. The past in so far as it is
understood *historically* (the historical past) is therefore
not the same thing as the past as it is studied by a natural
scientist. Just as the term "cause" needs to be
disambiguated to avoid conceptual confusion, so does the term
"past" because it means different things to the
humanistically oriented historiographer as it does, for example, to a
geologist:



> 
> 
> There is a certain analogy between the archaeologist's
> interpretation of a stratified site and a geologist's
> interpretation of rock-horizons with their associated fossils; but the
> difference is no less clear than the similarity. The
> archaeologist's use of his stratified relics depends on his
> conceiving them as artifacts serving human purposes and thus
> expressing a particular way in which men have thought of their own
> life; and from his point of view the palaeontologist, arranging his
> fossils in a time-series, is not working as an historian, but only as
> a scientist thinking in a way which can at most be described as
> quasi-historical. (IH 1993: 212)
> 
> 
> 



While both the geologist and the historian are concerned with the
past, the questions that they ask and the presuppositions which give
rise to those questions are different. Scientific inquiry rests on the
presupposition of the uniformity of nature. This principle is required
to formulate the inductive hypotheses which enable empirical
scientists to predict what will happen in the future and retrodict
what happened in the past. Empirically minded scientists presuppose
that everything that happens is subject to natural laws which are
invariant over time, for example, that water freezes at 0deg Celsius
under the reign of Queen Victoria as well as the time of Henry VIII.
But while this presupposition is well suited to serve the explanatory
goals of natural science, it is of limited use to historians who are
concerned not with what is invariant throughout history, but with what
is distinctive about different periods of time. It would not help an
Egyptologist to understand the rituals of the ancient Egyptian to
ascribe them the mindset of a medieval feudal baron. As Collingwood
puts it:



> 
> 
> Types of behaviour do, no doubt, recur, so long as minds of the same
> kind are placed in the same kind of situations. The behaviour-patterns
> characteristic of a feudal baron were no doubt fairly constant so long
> as there were feudal barons living in a feudal society. But they will
> be sought in vain (except by an inquirer content with the loosest and
> most fanciful analogies) in a world whose social structure is of
> another kind. In order that behaviour-patterns may be constant, there
> must be in existence a social order which recurrently produces
> situations of a certain kind. But social orders are historical facts,
> and subject to inevitable change, fast or slow. A positive science of
> mind will, no doubt, be able to establish uniformities and
> recurrences, but it can have no guarantee that the laws it establishes
> will hold good beyond the historical period from which its facts are
> drawn. (IH 1993: 223-224)
> 
> 
> 



Collingwood is critical of those philosophers who, like Bradley
(1874), bring the presuppositions of natural science to bear upon the
study of the *historical* past. It is not the role of
historians to dismiss as false the testimony of historical agents who
attest to the occurrence of miracles on the grounds that since nature
is uniform and its laws do not change, the miracles past agents
attested to could not have happened because their occurrence
contravenes the laws of nature. This "positivistic spirit"
(IH 1993: 135-36) encourages a judgmental attitude towards the
historical sources rather than an attempt to understand their meaning.
This is not to say that historians need to believe that miracles
happened in order to understand the sources, but rather that
understanding the role that belief in the supernatural had for the
agents who witnessed to them is more important for the historian than
assessing whether belief in the supernatural is true or false:



> 
> 
> If the reasons why it is hard for a man to cross the mountains is
> because he is frightened of the devils in them, it is folly for the
> historian, preaching at him across a gulf of centuries, to say
> "This is sheer superstition, there are no devils at all. Face
> facts, and realize there are no dangers in the mountains except rocks
> and water and snow, wolves perhaps, and bad men perhaps, but no
> devils." The historian says that these are the facts because
> that is the way in which he has been taught to think. But the
> devil-fearer says that the presence of devils is a fact, because that
> is the way in which he has been taught to think. The historian thinks
> it a wrong way; but wrong ways of thinking are just as much historical
> facts as right ones, and, no less than they, determine the situation
> (always a thought-situation) in which the man who shares them is
> placed. (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). Ignoring this advice leads to writing
"scissors-and-paste" histories where the sources are
treated as worthwhile historical material and admitted into the
historian's narrative only if they are deemed to be believable
by the historian's own standards of evidence. To understand the
past historically is to understand the "context of
thought" (IH 1993: 299) of past agents, *their* frame of
mind. What makes an investigation *historical*, therefore, is
not simply the fact that it is focused on the past, but the kind of
concerns by which it is guided when investigating the past. To
understand past agents is to understand the way in which they
reasoned, the inferences that they drew, the conceptual connections
which they made, the symbolic significance they attached to certain
events. Understanding a past occurrence, such as Caesar's
crossing of the Rubicon historically, for example, is to understand
the significance that it had for a contemporary Roman who knew what
Roman law permitted and proscribed. This is what differentiates a
concern with the historical past from a concern with the natural
past:



> 
> 
> The historian, investigating an event in the past, makes a distinction
> between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By
> the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can
> be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of
> Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon
> at one date, or the spilling of his blood across the floor of the
> senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it
> which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar's
> defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy
> between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned
> with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is
> investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which
> has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the
> unity of the outside and the inside of an event. He is interested in
> the crossing of the Rubicon only in its relation to Republican law,
> and in the spilling of Caesar's blood only in relation to a
> constitutional conflict. (IH 1993: 213)
> 
> 
> 



To understand Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon against the
background of Republican law is to understand the crossing as
transgressing not a law of nature (natural laws apply uniformly to the
present, past, and future), but a military norm which banned armed
generals from crossing a border (norms, unlike natural laws, change
from time to time). 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. 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. The mindset of
past agents cannot be investigated under the presupposition which
governs empirical science, i.e., the uniformity of nature, because the
study of mind, is a "normative or criteriological enquiry"
(PA: 171, footnote).



The distinction between the historical past and the natural past
corresponds to the distinction between the subject matters of the
sciences of mind and nature: the former study actions, in so far as
they explain what happens as an expression of thought, the latter
study events insofar as they approach their subject matter as
instantiating certain observable patterns. As such
"actions" and "events" are the correlatives of
different kinds inferences. Collingwood captured the distinction
between actions and events by claiming that the former have an inside
which the latter lack (IH 1993: 118). The point of this claim was to
draw attention to the fact that the meaning or significance of an
action eludes nomological explanations which account for what happens
by subsuming their explanandum under general laws. A historian might,
for example, observe certain empirical regularities (in the past every
time that white smoke emanated from the Sistine chapel in Rome, large
crowds of people cheered), without understanding "why" in
a particular sense of "why" the crowds cheered. If a
social scientist suggested that the crowds cheered *because*
white smoke emanated from the Sistine Chapel, this kind of
"because" would singularly fail to address the question
that the historian wants answered. The kind of explanation that would
satisfy the curiosity of the historian is one which states something
along the lines of "the crowds cheered because a new pope was
elected" but such an explanation would not be possible without
invoking the "context of thought" within which alone one
can understand the symbolic significance of the white smoke. Words
like "cause" or "because", Collingwood claims,
are not necessarily



> 
> 
> out of place in reference to history; it only means that they are used
> there in a special sense. When a scientist asks: "Why did that
> piece of litmus paper turn pink?" he means "On what kinds
> of occasions do pieces of litmus paper turn pink?" When an
> historian asks "Why did Brutus stab Caesar?" he means
> "What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab
> Caesar?" The cause of the event, for him, means the thought in
> the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about: and this
> is not something other than the event, it is the inside of the event
> itself. (IH 1993: 214-215)
> 
> 
> 



The inside/outside distinction that Collingwood often invokes to
explicate the differences between the subject matters of history and
science is a highly metaphorical way of defending a commitment to
explanatory pluralism and the irreducibility of historical to
scientific explanations. This metaphor has unfortunately sometimes
been read literally, leading to Collingwood being unfairly attacked
for defending the view that the subject matter of history is an
internal, unobservable psychological process and for putting forward
an equally implausible method for accessing it: re-enactment.


### 3.2 Re-enactment



One of the most discussed aspects of Collingwood's philosophy of
history is his claim that the historical past is not retrodicted but
re-enacted. The task of historians is not to establish that a past
event had to happen in the past, in a way analogous to that in which a
scientist predicts that a solar eclipse will happen in the future, but
to re-enact the thoughts of historical agents. Collingwood claims that
when historians re-enact the thought of an historical agent, they do
not re-enact a thought of a similar kind but the very same thought as
the agent. This claim has often been regarded as counterintuitive
because to say that the thought of the agent and that of the historian
are one and the same appears to presuppose that there is only one
rather than two numerically distinct acts of thought: that of the
historian and that of the agent. Collingwood's point, however,
is that, since what the historian re-enacts, i.e., the propositional
content of thought (he refers to this simply as *thought*) is
distinct from the acts of thinking (he refers to these as
*sensations/feelings*), the criterion of identity that is
normally applied to individuate acts of thinking does not apply to
thought (IH 1993: 287). Acts of thinking are individuated and
distinguished from one another by adopting spatial criteria. By
contrast thoughts (i.e., propositional contents) are individuated on
the basis of purely qualitative criteria, so that if there are two
people entertaining the (qualitatively) same thought, there is
(numerically) only one thought since there is only one propositional
content. For Collingwood, if Jane and Jim recite the practical
syllogism "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore
Socrates is mortal" they entertain one and the same thought. By
the same token, a historian who re-enacts the thought of a past agent
entertains the very same thought as the historical agent:



> 
> 
> ... in its immediacy, as an actual experience of his own,
> Plato's argument must undoubtedly have grown up out of a
> discussion of some sort, though I do not know what it was, and been
> closely connected to such a discussion. Yet if I not only read his
> argument but understand it, follow it in my own mind re-enacting it
> with and for myself, the process of argument which I go through is not
> a process resembling Plato's, it is actually Plato's so
> far as I understand him correctly. (IH 1993: 301)
> 
> 
> 



As the last clause in the quotation makes clear, Collingwood's
account of re-enactment aims to establish a conceptual point about
what exactly it is that historians re-enact (the thought as opposed to
the acts of thinking) and what the criteria for identifying and
distinguishing thoughts are. It is not meant to prescribe to
historians an empathetic method for the recovery of inner
psychological processes which are not accessible from a third person
perspective (Saari 1984 and 1989; Van der Dussen 1981 and 1995;
D'Oro 2000). Unfortunately the doctrine of re-enactment has been
widely read not as attempting to identify the subject matter of
history (thought, rather than acts of thinking), but as seeking to
articulate a method by which historian can recover hidden
psychological processes that are not accessible from the third person
perspective. In the aftermath of the publication of *The Idea of
History*, the re-enactment doctrine was widely associated with
Dilthey's account of empathetic understanding and accused of
ascribing to the historian implausible telepathic powers of access to
other minds (Gardiner 1952a and 1952b).



Collingwood's account of re-enactment could be criticised for
over-rationalizing the subject matter of history. His identification
of the object of re-enactment with "thought", and of
history as a criteriological or normative inquiry into thought, to the
exclusion of "feelings" or "sensations", might
seem too restrictive since a great deal of action is not rational, and
irrationality has been the driving force behind much that has happened
in history. When considering this objection, one must bear in mind
that "history" understood as a form of inquiry distinct
from natural science should not be conflated with
"history" as an academic discipline practised in
university departments. Practising historians will inevitably be
concerned with much more than "thought" and the specific
norms by which past agents led their lives. They will inevitably
mention irrational factors, just as they mention arational natural
forces (earthquakes, floods and other natural phenomena that impact on
historical agents). Collingwood's goal was not to tell
historians what they can and cannot say about what happened in the
past, but to distinguish between two very different ways in which the
past can be approached: under the assumption of the uniformity of
nature and under the assumption that the deeds of historical agents
are responses to norms rather than instances of natural laws.



Collingwood's account of re-enactment certainly implies that the
historical past is in principle knowable, that it is possible to
mediate reality through the conceptual framework, for example, of the
ancient Egyptians or the ancient Greeks. This is not to say that the
past can be known in itself, or independently of any conceptual
mediation, but that it can be seen from the perspective of past
agents, through the categorial framework that mediated their
conception of reality. 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. Historical knowledge, Collingwood says



> 
> 
> is not concerned only with a remote past. It is by historical thinking
> that we re-think and so rediscover the thoughts of Hammurabi or Solon,
> it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who
> writes us a letter, or a friend who crosses the street. (IH 1993:
> 219)
> 
> 
> 



In so far as Collingwood's account of re-enactment defends the
possibility of knowing the past as it always was for historical agents
(the historian, as we have seen, seeks to establish what crossing the
Rubicon meant to a Roman cognizant of Republican law) it goes against
a view that became dominant in the latter part of the twentieth
century, according to which the past cannot be known as it always was
because it is constantly and necessarily revised from the perspective
of the present. This view was endorsed with varying degrees of
emphasis in the philosophical hermeneutics of H-G. Gadamer, in the
philosophy of history, and the philosophy of language. Gadamer's
philosophical hermeneutics claimed that the past "is understood
only if it is understood in a different way every time" (1960
[1975: 275]) because the meaning of a text is the result of a fusion
of the horizons of the text to be interpreted and the horizon of the
interpreter. In the philosophy of history narrativists such as Hayden
White (1973), Frank Ankersmit (1983) and Keith Jenkins (1991)
emphasised the cultural endowment of the historian as the lens through
which the past is accessed. Even the philosophy of language was not
immune from this trend. Quine (1960) famously denied that it is
possible to achieve determinacy in translation in direct opposition to
Collingwood's claim that it is at least in principle possible to
re-enact the very same thought as the historical agent. This
revisionary view of the past goes against Collingwood's
conception of what it means to understand the past historically. 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. He is
critical of the argument, advanced by John Stuart Mill that the
distinction between the human and the natural sciences is merely a
distinction in the degree of accuracy that can be reached in their
respective domains of inquiry. In his *System of Logic* (1843),
Mill argued that the subject matter of psychology differs from that of
the natural sciences because psychology studies human actions. Yet the
method by which the psychologist studies human actions is the same
(inductive) method that is operative in natural science. Psychologists
predict human behaviour in the same way in which natural scientists
predict natural events, by inferring it from certain antecedent
conditions and empirical generalisations. While the generalisations of
psychologists invoke psychological rather than natural laws, the
method is the same. The difference between psychology and natural
science lies in the fact that the predictions of psychologists unlike,
say, those of astronomers are imprecise. Such a difference, for Mill,
is insufficiently robust to support the claim for disunity in the
sciences. The most accurate way of drawing the distinction between
psychology and astronomy is not to deny that psychology is a (natural)
science, but to acknowledge that there are two kinds of natural
sciences, those which are precise (like astronomy) and those which are
imprecise (like psychology). According to Mill's way of drawing
the distinction psychology is, like tidology and meteorology, an
inexact (natural) science. The contrast (for Mill) is therefore not
between two kinds of sciences in the Latin sense of *scientia*,
meaning two distinct kinds of knowledge, but between different kinds
of natural sciences: exact and inexact. Collingwood rejected
Mill's suggestion that the reconstruction of the thoughts of
historical agents is a past-directed empirical psychology. The study
of mind is, as we saw earlier, a normative or criteriological
endeavour because to understand past agents historically is to
understand the conceptual connections they made by reconstructing
their thought-context. The subject matter of history, Collingwood
claims, is not merely human actions but *res gestae*. 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. (PH:
> 46)
> 
> 
> 



Psychology, as understood by Mill, is what in *An Essay on
Metaphysics* Collingwood calls a "pseudo-science of
thought" (EM 1998: 142) because it fails to acknowledge
that the concept of mind is, in the words of Gallie (1956), an
essentially contested concept that (like "cause",
"action", "science", and "the
past") needs to be disambiguated. This is not to say that
empirical psychology is not a legitimate scientific pursuit, but that
the subject matter of empirical psychology and that of history are not
the same and that the attempt to capture the mind by the methods of
empirical science should be denounced as the attempt by one form of
knowledge to trespass on the territory of another.



The distinction between the method of history and that of science is
not a distinction between the explanations of psychology understood as
an empirical science of the mind and those of physics or astronomy. It
is a distinction between two different forms of knowing with
distinctive explananda: actions and events. The action/event
distinction designates therefore not a distinction between
inner/private psychological processes and outward/observable
phenomena, but between two different ways of knowing the past:
*qua* actions or *qua* events. The description of the
past *qua* actions is the correlative of a certain kind of
(historical) explanation; the description of the past *qua*
events is the correlative of a certain kind of scientific/nomological
explanation. The action/event distinction is, in the vocabulary of
*An Essay on Philosophical Method* a philosophical distinction
which does not capture two separate classes of things, but brings the
past under different descriptions, *qua* natural and
*qua* historical past.



The relevance of Collingwood's defence of the autonomy of
history to debates concerning the unity/disunity of science was
brought to the attention of a wider audience by W. H. Dray during the
1950s and 60s. Dray (1958, 1963) located Collingwood's
action/event distinction within the context of contemporary debates in
the philosophy of social science and drew on the work of Collingwood
to reject the claim for methodological unity advanced by Hempel in his
influential 1942 article: "The Function of General Laws in
History". Hempel claimed that explanations in history are
covertly nomological explanations because historians, just as natural
scientists, rely upon general laws, even if they do not explicitly
mention them. Dray argued that Hempel failed to see that what
distinguishes action from event explanations is the nature of the
connection between the *explanans* and the
*explanandum*. In naturalistic explanations the
*explanans* is an antecedent condition, a state of affairs
which precedes in time the event whose cause it is said to be; in the
historical explanation of action the *explanans* is the logical
ground of an action, the thought that renders the action intelligible.
Whilst in the 1950s and 60s Collingwood played an important role in
the debate concerning the logical form of action explanation and how
it differs from the causal explanation of events, his work became less
influential in the second half of the twentieth century. The neglect
into which Collingwood's account of action and its explanation
has fallen is linked to a change in metaphilosophical assumptions and
the return of the kind of metaphysics which he had sought to replace
with the presuppositional analysis described in *An Essay on
Metaphysics*.



As we saw, according to Collingwood the distinction between the
explanation of action and of events was a distinction between
different forms of inferences or, as he put it in *An Essay on
Metaphysics*, between the different senses that the term
"cause" or "because" has in different
explanatory contexts. Collingwood's metaphysics of absolute
presuppositions committed him to a form of explanatory pluralism in
which different kinds of explanations do not compete because they
answer different questions, which arise because of different
presuppositions; the choice between one kind of explanation and
another depends on whether they are fit for purpose, i.e., whether
they satisfy the curiosity of the person who is asking the question.
With the return of a more robust form of metaphysics, the suggestion
that the choice between one type of explanation and another could be
resolved by disambiguating which sense of causation needs to be
invoked in order to satisfy the curiosity of the questioner came to be
dismissed as an attempt to get away with ontologically light weight
solutions to the problem of the relation between the science of mind
and nature. The predominant problem in the philosophy of mind and
action became that of how the mind can fit in the natural world, a
question which presupposes the kind of metaphysics that Collingwood
sought to leave behind.



Much philosophy of history tends to be governed by an epistemological
concern with how historical knowledge is possible beginning from the
assumption that historical knowledge is knowledge of the past. The
primary task of a philosophy of history is consequently taken to be
that of explaining how the past can be known given that, unlike the
present, it is not available for observation, nor can it be reproduced
under experimental conditions. Collingwood's approach to the
philosophy of history is quite different. He denied that a mere
concern with the past is sufficient to identify a distinctive subject
matter for historical inquiry, one which justifies considering history
as a science, in the Latin sense of *scientia*, i.e., a form of
knowing. The past after all is studied by geologists, as well as
historians so if history is a distinctive form of knowing it must do
more than merely study the past. He therefore took the primary task of
a philosophy of history to be that of articulating not an
epistemological theory accounting for how the past can be known, but
that of disambiguating the subject matter of history from that of
natural science by applying the presuppositional analysis that he had
expounded in *An Essay on Metaphysics* to historical knowledge.
The application of this presuppositional analysis yields the claim
that the presuppositions of history are different from those of
natural science because reenacting the thoughts of past agents
involves re-thinking conceptual connections. Historians presuppose
that past agents are responsive to norms, not that their behaviour
conforms to natural laws. The task of philosophical analysis is to
uncover these different presuppositions with a view to showing that
there is no conflict between the claims of history and those of
science, not because historical explanations are incomplete
nomological explanations, but because they are complete explanations
of a different kind, which answer different kinds of questions. This
of course is not to deny that there are important epistemological
questions concerning the past but rather that the distinctive
epistemology of historical knowing can be articulated only once the
kind of past with which history is concerned is clearly
identified:



> 
> 
> ... a great many things which deeply concern human beings are
> not, and never have been, traditionally included in the subject-matter
> of history. People are born, eat and breathe and sleep, and beget
> children and become ill and recover again, and die; and these things
> interest them, most of them at any rate, far more than art and
> science, industry and politics and war. Yet none of these things have
> been traditionally regarded as possessing historical interest. Most of
> them have given rise to institutions like dining and marrying and the
> various rituals that surround birth and death, sickness and recovery;
> and of these rituals and institutions people write histories; but the
> history of dining is not the history of eating, and the history of
> death-rituals is not the history of death. (PH: 46).
> 
> 
> 



If Collingwood's philosophy of history is an attempt to identify
the distinctive subject matter of history and the logical form of
historical judgements, then his metaphilosophy should be understood as
defending a form of explanatory pluralism, not a form of historical
relativism (D'Oro 2018b). The latter claims that belief systems
are beyond criticism because truth and falsity are relative to what
certain people, at certain times, believe to be true. The former, by
contrast, claims that different kinds of explanations are answers to
different kinds of questions and that the task of philosophical
analysis is to undo the conceptual knots in which we get tangled when
we fail to order our thoughts with due care. This of course is an
interpretative claim that advocates of the radical conversion
hypothesis (see section 2.3 above) are likely to deny insofar as they
tend to read Collingwood's metaphilosophy as articulating not a
defence of the autonomy of philosophy, but as dissolving philosophy
into a descriptive study of the belief systems that different people
had through time.