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The Hesitant Hegelian: Collingwood, Hegel, and Inter-war Oxford
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Abstract
It was only ever with great reluctance that R.G. Collingwood accepted any philosophical label, whether ‘idealist’ or ‘Hegelian’: he always preferred to think of himself as beating his own philosophical path. This paper examines his relationship with the legacy of Hegel as mediated by the British Hegelians and the Italian idealists and suggests that An Essay on Philosophical Method marks the point at which his struggle to come to terms with legacy in the form of a reasoned statement of his own philosophical method and principles was resolved.
- Type
- Hegel and British Philosophy
- Information
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 26 , Issue 1-2: number 51/52 , 2005 , pp. 57 - 73
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2005
References
Notes
1 Collingwood, R.G., An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 15–16 Google Scholar.
2 Collingwood, R.G., An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933 Google Scholar, revised edition with an introduction and additional material, edited by James Connelly and Giussepina D'Oro, 2005) (Hereafter EPM), p. 102.
3 Croce, B., The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (London: Howard Larimer, 1913)Google Scholar.
4 Collingwood, R. G., Religion and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1916)Google Scholar.
5 Collingwood, R. G., An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 48 Google Scholar.
6 Collingwood, R. G., Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924)Google Scholar
7 Notes in proof copy of Religion and Philosophy. In the possession of his daughter, Mrs Teresa Smith.
8 Published in Concerning Prayer, ed. Dougall, L. (London: Macmillan, 1916)Google Scholar. In the possession of Mrs Teresa Smith.
9 It is to be found amongst the Collingwood manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. All manuscripts cited are to be found in die Bodleian Library unless otherwise stated.
10 ‘Action’ Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 1923, p. 42.
11 Collingwood, R. G., Speculum Mentis, p. 108n Google Scholar.
12 A view repeated in The Philosophy of History (1930), a pamphlet published by the Historical Association.
13 ‘The Idea of a Philosophy of Something’, and, in particular, ‘A Philosophy of History’, 1927, reprinted in The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946, revised edition with an introduction and additional material edited by van der Dussen, W.J., 1993), pp. 351–2Google Scholar.
14 ‘A Footnote to Future History’, p. 5.
15 Letter to de Ruggiero, October 2nd 1920.
16 Letter to de Ruggiero, March 20th 1921.
17 Mink, L. O., Mind, History and Dialetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 5–6 Google Scholar.
18 Letter to de Ruggiero, August 24th 1923.
19 Croce, B, ‘In Commemoration of an English Friend’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 3, 1996, p. 178 Google Scholar.
20 This account is taken from H. S. Harris's introduction to his translation of Gentile, G., Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), p. 18 Google Scholar.
21 Collingwood, R. G., Speculum Mentis, pp. 12–13 Google Scholar.
22 Letter to de Ruggiero, November 16th 1924.
23 R. G. Collingwood, EPM, p. 11.
24 Ibid., p. 161.
25 Croce, , What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 95 Google Scholar.
26 Croce, op. cit., pp. 5–6.
27 See Ryle, G., ‘Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument’, Mind Vol. 44, 1935, pp. 137–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the Collingwood-Ryle correspondence in the revised edition of EPM.
28 Ibid., p. 60.
29 Ibid., pp.70–1.
30 Ibid., p. 77.
31 Ibid., p. 81.
32 Ibid., pp. 81–6.
33 Ibid., p. 82.
34 Ibid., p. 84.
35 Ibid., p. 89.
36 Ibid., pp. 86–7.
37 Ibid., p. 87.
38 Ibid., p. 88.
39 Loc. cit.
40 Loc. cit.
41 In his introduction to the revised edition of An Essay on Metaphysics, Rex Martin points out that a historical use of the scale of forms requires modification as its particular forms might not be co-present In a historical process, for example, it may be that a later phase has no point of temporal coincidence widi an earlier phase and hence the two cannot overlap as they can and do in a purely conceptual scale of forms (pp. xxxviii–xlv).
42 Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 22n Google Scholar.
43 Published in the revised edition of The New Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942, revised edition with an introduction and additional material edited by Boucher, David, 1992)Google Scholar.
44 I discuss the relation between the two Essays in detail in Metaphysics, Method and Politics: the Political Philosophy of R. G. Coltingvood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003)Google Scholar.
45 Speculum Mentis, p. 208.
46 ‘The Metaphysics of F. H. Bradley’, 1933 (reprinted in the revised edition of An Essay on Philosophical Method) p. 244 Google Scholar.
47 Ibid., p. 245.
48 Knox, T. M., Prefatory Note to The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. v Google Scholar.
49 ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, 1933–1934, Notebook A, pp. 6–8 Google Scholar.
50 ‘Method and Metaphysics’, 1935 (reprinted in the revised edition of An Essay on Philosophical Method) pp. 329–330)Google Scholar.
51 Ibid., p. 334.
52 All other letters to the Clarendon Press are in their archives.
53 Letter to the Clarendon Press, 16th June 1939.
54 Letter to the Clarendon Press, 15th March 1940.
55 Letter to the Clarendon Press, 14th May 1940.
56 Letter to T. M. Knox, 6th January 1940, St. Andrews University Library. The paper referred to is ‘Hegel and Prussianism’.
57 Browning, Gary in Rethinking R. G. Collingvood (London: Palgrave, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues at length that Collingwood was influenced greatly by Hegel and that his work should be read with this in mind.
58 Lectures on Realism and Idealism, 1935, final paragraph.