R.G. Collingwood and the philosophy of history: part 1

June 6, 8:20 PMFort Worth Philosophy ExaminerBenjamin Mullikin

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R. G. Collingwood as a young man

In response to what has seemed to be merely dogmatic assertions about the way we ought to think, I propose to discuss the thoughts of a man who, being a respected Oxford fellow post mortem, somehow avoided the respect he should have been given while alive both as a philosophy and as an academic. One of the problems that surround the academic life of R. G. Collingwood according to his peers is that he had this ambitious tendency to pursue whatever academic interest before him, without regard to his position nor his surroundings. He has published works in Theology (Religion and Philosophy), Metaphysics (An Essay on Metaphysics), History (Roman Britain), and even Art (The Principles of Art).

While this was increasingly odd during a time when, in Oxford, the respected academic was expected to master a specific subject without any interest or regard to other academic fields, it revived an older even more traditional approach to academics where a professor was certain to know the generally large array of subjects found in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what Mr. Collingwood’s most important academic contributions are. He is certainly remembered fondly as a historian, being the successor to the famous Roman British historian F. J. Haverfield, continuing his work through archeological projects and the publication of Roman Britain.

Being as this is a philosophy column we must certainly give credence to his highly ambitious (and even revolutionary) philosophic thought, where he proposed a methodological philosophy based not on the analytic philosophy of men such as Bertrand Russell (which he regarded as a positivist), but on system of questions and their corresponding answers. “you cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements” Mr. Collingwood writes in his autobiography, “...In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was to which the thing he has said or written was meant to answer.†” This of course is very practical method not at all intending to reduce philosophy or science to Hegelian historicism, but rather an attempt to ground philosophy on something more tangible than the competing philosophies of the day, the Idealism of F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green and the Realism of J. C. Wilson, both of which he accused of being detatched from practical affairs of real life by distinguishing their thought from their actions. Collingwood hoped, instead, to empoy a more organic relationship between the way we think and the way we act such that our philosophy is in a way embodied in our everyday activities.