¹ Collingwood uses the terms “re-enactment” and “re-thinking” synonymously (The Idea of History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970], 215, 288Google Scholar). The historian's re-enactment of the thought behind an historical agent's action consists in the fact that he shows that his action was rational because it followed as a practical inference from the epistemic and motivational premises of the action (ibid., 283, 312–313). See also van der Dussen, W. J., History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), 145–146CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My references to Collingwood's unpublished manuscripts are based on the material published in van der Dussen, History as a Science, and in Nielsen, Margit Hurup, R. G. Collingwood's historiefilosofi. En undersøgelse af ‘re-enactment’ -tesens interpretation, Skrifter utgivet af det historiske institut ved Københavns universitet, Bind 11 (København: Den danske historiske forening, 1980).Google Scholar

² For a critical comment on the view that the identity of the historical agent's thought and that of the historian is a precondition for successful re-enactment, see, e.g., Martin, Rex, Historical Explanation. Re-enactment and Practical Inference (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 61–62.Google Scholar

³ Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 111Google Scholar. Cf. Collingwood, , Idea of History, 218, 288.Google Scholar

⁴ Collingwood, , Autobiography, 112.Google Scholar

⁵ Collingwood, , Idea of History, 288.Google Scholar

⁶ Collingwood makes a distinction between thought in its immediacy or the subjective-temporal context of thought and thought in its mediation or the logical context of thought, which is the same for all who think the same thought. By the subjective-temporal context of thought he means, on the one hand, thought as immediate, subjective experience (acts of thoughts as mental occurrences), and, on the other hand, the unique temporal context in which the agent performs his act of thought (ibid., 297–298). By “thought in its mediation” Collingwood means that A and B think the same thought in so far as the content of their acts of thought is the same, although their acts of thought are different as mental acts (ibid., 300–302).

⁷ Ibid., 285.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid., 286; see also ibid., 287–288.

¹⁰ Ibid., 286–288, 300–302.

¹¹ Collingwood, , Autobiography, 113.Google Scholar

¹² Ibid., 112, cf. Collingwood, , Idea of History, 286–288Google Scholar. For a commentator who contends that Collingwood has not demonstrated that temporal discontinuity is irrelevant to deciding the identity of acts of thought, see Meiland, Jack, Scepticism and Historical Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1965), 73–77.Google Scholar

¹³ Van der Dussen, , History as a Science, 148Google Scholar. Cf. Nielsen, , Collingwood's historiefilosofi, 231.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Donagan, Alan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 220.Google Scholar

¹⁵ In the second edition of The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar, Donagan has rewritten his earlier discussion of Collingwood's view of the identity of thoughts (220–222). He does not any more discuss Collingwood's view in terms of “numerical identity” and “numerical difference”, but takes, quite correctly, Collingwood as meaning that, e.g., Sir Thomas Heath thought in 1908 the same thought as Euclid (i.e., that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal) in so far as “Heath implicitly professed to have thought of a propositional content identical with that of a thought of Euclid's; and since he too believed the truth of that propositional content to follow from Euclid's axioms, he took the same propositional attitude towards it as well” (ibid., 221).

¹⁶ Collingwood, , Idea of History, 284–286Google Scholar. See also The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 157–158.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Malcolm, Norman, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 120.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Nielsen, , Collingwood's historiefilosofi, 232.Google Scholar

¹⁹ There are, of course, many different kinds of empirical criteria of identity. For example, the physiological criteria that are applied to establish the identity of people's pains are different from those empirical criteria that we may use to establish the identity of people's actions.

²⁰ Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 87, 115.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid., 87.

²² This alternative is closely related to the intuitionist interpretation according to which re-enactment is a specific historical method the application of which presupposes that the historian enters into the mind of the historical agent and re-lives his subjective experience in an intuitive act of Einfühlung. For this interpretation, see Walsh, W. H., “Review of R. G. Collingwood. The Idea of History”, Philosophy 22/82 (1947), 153–160CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Walsh, W. H., An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1967), 57–58Google Scholar. For a critical discussion of the intuitionist interpretation of the re-enactment doctrine, see, e.g., my Re-enactment: A Study in R. G. Collingwood's Philosophy of History, Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A, Vol. 63, nr 2 (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1984), 89–95.Google Scholar

²³ For Wittgenstein's refutation of the idea that a person may develop his own “private” language in which he can ascribe meaning to mental words independently of his linguistic community, see Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), §§241 ff.Google Scholar

²⁴ Van der Dussen, , History as a Science, 317.Google Scholar

²⁵ In saying that we can establish the identity of people's mental events by making use of conceptual criteria of identity I do not deny the role of introspection, or the use of empirical criteria of identity. For example, even if the grammar of the word “pain” is presupposed in every introspective pain-report, the patient can certainly tell a lot of things about his pain by introspecting his own sensations of pain.

²⁶ Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, §242; cf. ibid., §241.

²⁷ See his review of my Re-enactment: A Stitch in R. G. Collingwooa” s Philosophy of History, Theoria 51 (1985). Part 2. 121–123.Google Scholar

²⁸ Martin suggests, in discussing Collingwood's theory of absolute presuppositions, that “[i]t is … by assimilating instances and thence absolute presuppositions to one another, that transhistorical, or cross-cultural, understanding becomes possible” (“Collingwood's Doctrine of Absolute Presuppositions and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge”, in Pompa, L. and Dray, W., eds., Substance and Form in History [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981], 103Google Scholar; see also ibid., 102 and 104).

²⁹ Cf. Collingwood, . Idea of History, 287, 300–301.Google Scholar

³⁰ Cf. John Cook who remarks, in discussing some problems connected with the notion of identity, that “there is no such thing as being just the same—no such thing as identity pure and simple …. ‘Same’ must always be understood together with some general term, such as ‘build’ or ‘coat’ and the criterion of identity in any particular case is determined by the general term involved” (“Wittgenstein on Privacy”, in Pitcher, George, ed., Wittgenstein. The Philosophical Investigations. A Collection of Critical Essays [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968]), 313Google Scholar. See also Donagan who makes the same point (Donagan, , The Later Philosophy [1st ed.], 221).Google Scholar

³¹ Winch, , Social Science, 27.Google Scholar

³² Collingwood, R. G. and Myres, J. N. L., Roman Britain and the English Settlements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 34Google Scholar; cf. Collingwood, , Autobiography, 131.Google Scholar

³³ For their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Sveinn Eldon, Lars Hertzberg, Heikki Kannisto, Rex Martin and an anonymous referee for Dialogue.