This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

This chapter explores two influential conceptions of the role of common sense in philosophical theorizing from early analytical philosophy, due to G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both approaches set out an important function for our everyday certainties to play in the epistemological enterprise, albeit in very different ways. For Moore, our common-sense certainties serve as a kind of reasonable stopping point in philosophical disputes. In particular, where common sense confronts philosophical theory, we can reasonably side with common sense. While Moore claims that our common-sense certainties have an epistemic weight simply in virtue of being common-sense certainties, for Wittgenstein the certainty that attaches to these commitments entails that they have no rational status at all. Nonetheless, this doesn’t prevent them from having a crucial import to epistemological questions. By setting these two philosophical approaches side by side, we gain an important perspective on how common sense might be appealed to in philosophical theorizing.