This chapter argues that Collingwood’s “logic of question and answer” (LQA) can best be understood in the light of contemporary argumentation theory. Even if Collingwood quite often describes LQA in terms of inner thinking and reasoning, as was still usual in his time, his insistence on the normative (“criteriological”) character of LQA, paired with his attack on the pretensions of psychologists to describe logic (as well as other normative endeavours) in a purely empirical manner, makes clear that LQA has the same aspirations as the rising discipline of formal (mathematical) logic. The concise exposition of the form, content, and application of LQA is supported by references to all the relevant passages in Collingwood’s oeuvre as well as illustrated by means of a concrete example of his way of doing history. Although a recent and still developing discipline, contemporary argumentation theory was born as an attempt to describe and analyze argumentative texts as guided by norms constitutive of our argumentative practices in a way that completely escapes formal logic. It thus provides a place for LQA that has so far been lacking.

Chapter 4 focuses on Stevens’ conception of autonomy with the purpose of reassessing his poetry’s relation to philosophy. Stevens not only thematizes this relation in his poetry, but also identifies the processes that decouple the reflective operations of poetic thinking from that of philosophy. The chapter explores this aspect of Stevens’ work from the 1930s and 1940s in dialogue with Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” which allows for a consideration of poetry as a site for thinking without the support or guidance of philosophical discourse. The notion of inaesthetics becomes the enabling occasion for a focus on the divergences, rather than the affinities, between Stevens and philosophy, and for a move to a historically contextualized understanding of his poetry’s resistance to the philosophical school of logical positivism. Stevens’ skepticism toward logical positivism must be added to the historical factors behind his increased emphasis on poetic autonomy from philosophy in his writing of this period.