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Collingwood and the Radical Conversion Hypothesis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Lionel Rubinoff
Lionel Rubinoff
Affiliation:
York University Toronto
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Extract

In 1938, four years before his death, Collingwood characterized his life as “in the main an attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and history” (Autobiography, 77). Collingwood's success in this matter has been a subject of much debate. The majority of his critics have argued, following the leadership of T. A. Knox, that the alleged rapprochement was a failure. In the early writings, such as Religion and Philosophy and Speculum Mentis, it is simply obscure. In An Essay on Philosophical Method it emerges more clearly but with a definite bias in favour of philosophy. Sometime between 1936 and 1938, however, Collingwood underwent a radical conversion to the historicist doctrine, typical of the thought of Croce, that philosophy is a branch of history. The result, according to the Knox thesis, was an explicit repudiation, in the Autobiography (1938) and An Essay on Metaphysics (1939), of Collingwood's earlier belief in the priority and autonomy of philosophy.

Type
Études Critiques—Critical Notices
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , June 1966 , pp. 71 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1966

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References

1 Idea of History, 209.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., Editor's Preface, xix–xx.

3 Ibid., xi. ff.

4 Proceedings of British Academy, Vol. 29, 1943, 470; Idea of History, xi.

5 Idea of History, x.

6 Ibid., vii.

7 I recommend a serious attempt to evaluate the doctrines of the Essay according to criteria laid down by Collingwood himself in Speculum Mentis. What happens if we regard Collingwood's own philosophieal output as a scale of forms—a scale which by definition admits of differences as well as similarities? The answer might very well be that such differences as may appear as either a series of irreconcilable inconsistencies or as evidence of significant changes of outlook will emerge, when regarded from the standpoint of the logic of the overlap of classes, as forms on a scale—i.e. as systematic differences which perform a logical function in the system as a whole, and which have, in essence, been anticipated from the start. (This interpretation could be defended in spite of the fact that Collingwood himself inadvertently contributed to the common misunderstanding of his intentions by attempting, in the Autobiography and An Essay on Metaphysics, to expound the “dialectical” logic of Speculum Mentis and An Essay on Philosophical Method in a neutral and less ‘metaphysical’ language designed chiefly for a hostile positivist audience.)

8 An Essay on Metaphysics, 169

9 Ibid., 197.

10 Autobiography, 56.

11 “Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument”, Mind, LXIV, 1935Google Scholar.

12 An Essay on Metaphysics, 65.

13 Speculum Mentis, 57.

14 Idea of History, 215–16.