R. G. Collingwood

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The English historian and philosopher Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943) did important historical research on Roman Britain and made original contributions to esthetics, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of mind.

Born at Coniston, Lancashire, R.G. Collingwood received his early education from his father, a painter and a friend and biographer of John Ruskin. Under Ruskin's precepts Collingwood was trained in the arts and crafts in addition to the classical languages. At the age of 14 he went to Rugby to prepare for college. He did brilliant work at Oxford and was elected to a fellowship at Pembroke College in 1912. During World War I he worked in the Admiralty Intelligence Division in London; after the armistice he returned to teaching at Oxford and was elected Waynfleete professor of metaphysical philosophy in 1934.

Throughout his teaching career Collingwood spent his summers working on archeological digs in Britain. He regarded this work as a laboratory in which he could test his philosophical theories about the logic of inquiry and about the relationship between history and philosophy. His many publications in this field culminated in his contribution to the Oxford History of England.

Collingwood's philosophical work falls into three periods. There was first a youthful period in which he sought to free himself from the realist doctrines of his Oxford teachers. This culminated in his Speculum mentis, a comparative study of five forms of experience arranged in an ascending order of truth: art, religion, science, history, and philosophy.

In the middle period of his writing Collingwood produced Essay on Philosophical Method. He expanded the insights of this work in The Idea of Nature and The Idea of History. His overall conclusion was that it is the task of philosophy to explore the presuppositions by which earlier cultures produced their characteristic views on nature and life. The implication is that once the historical part of this task is done, one can raise philosophical questions about the adequacy or truth value of the varying presuppositions. In his last period Collingwood seemed to deny philosophy any independent role - it is absorbed into the history of thought.

Collingwood's work in the last 5 years of his life shows defects and inconsistencies that can be traced in some measure to his rapidly declining health. In 1938 he suffered the first of a series of strokes which finally incapacitated him. He died on Jan. 9, 1943, leaving a number of manuscripts and incompleted works, some of which were published by his literary executors.

Further Reading

Collingwood's An Autobiography (1939) follows his maxim that "all history is the history of thought" and describes the development of his ideas with only scattered biographical details. Alan Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (1962), is the best critical work on Collingwood and also contains a bibliography.

Additional Sources

Collingwood, R. G. (Robin George), An autobiography, Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press, 1978.

(1889-1943) British philosopher and archaeologist (specializing on Roman Britain), Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Magdalen College, Oxford University, 1935-41. Collingwood's work as a philosopher was wide-ranging, covering metaphysics, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind and of history. His The Idea of History, published posthumously in 1945, received particular attention by later philosophers of history. Collingwood also produced an important work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan (1942). In this work, he seeks to provide a theoretical defence of liberalism in the face of contemporary opposition from fascism and Nazism. Collingwood articulates a liberalism which owes much to T. H. Green and his followers, and to his Italian contemporary, Guido de Ruggiero (author of The History of European Liberalism, 1927, translated by Collingwood for Oxford University Press). Freedom, properly understood, consists in self-direction in accordance with a moral will: a will based on a recognition of the claims of other people to self-direction. It is the task of the liberal state to create the conditions under which this distinctively free personality can emerge and express itself. Collingwood places a particular emphasis on the educative governance necessary for the creation of free persons, and on the need to extend liberal principles to interstate relations.

— Stuart White

Collingwood, Robin George (1889-1943) English philosopher and historian. Born in the Lake District, Collingwood enjoyed a dual career as Roman historian and philosopher. He became a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1912, and professor of philosophy in Oxford in 1934. At the beginning of his career Collingwood tended towards idealism, being more in sympathy with Bradley and Croce than with the realists Russell or Moore, whose careless readings of historical philosophers particularly irked him. His historical work gave him a special interest in the activity of understanding and interpreting the past, an activity that he saw as continuous with our self-understanding and self-interpretation. It is not achieved by theorizing, but by the empathetic identification of the problem as it must have appeared to the subject, and a reliving of the deliberation that must then have ensued (see also simulation theory, verstehen). Collingwood anticipates themes in the later Wittgenstein by stressing how the meaning of sentences is given by the practical problems and questions to which they provide answers. He also emphasizes that the a priori is a doubtful and shifting historical category, and especially stresses the Hegelian insight that people essentially discover themselves first as members of communities, not as self-sufficient individuals. This removes any first-person privileged access in the philosophy of mind. Towards the end of his career, in the Essay on Metaphysics (1940), Collingwood argued for a full-blooded identification of metaphysics with history. The proper subject of metaphysics becomes the descriptive study of the ‘absolute presuppositions’ of the thought and science of a particular age. His major contributions include Speculum Mentis (1924), The Principles of Art (1938), and The Idea of History (1946).

Quotes:

"Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do."

"Parenthood is not an object of appetite or even desire. It is an object of will. There is no appetite for parenthood; there is only a purpose or intention of parenthood."

"Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue."

"A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life."

"What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid."

Robin George Collingwood
Born	22 February 1889 (1889-02-22) Cartmel, Lancashire
Died	9 January 1943 (1943-01-10) Coniston, Lancashire
Occupation	Philosopher and historian

Robin George Collingwood (22 February 1889 – 9 January 1943) was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel Fell in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats. He graduated with congratulatory first class honours and, prior to his graduation, was elected a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Main works published in his lifetime 3 Posthumously-published works 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Collingwood was a fellow of Pembroke, Oxford for some 15 years until becoming the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was the only pupil of F. J. Haverfield to survive World War I.^{[citation needed]} Important influences on Collingwood were the Italian Idealists Croce, Gentile and Guido de Ruggiero, the last of whom was also a close friend. Other important influences were Hegel, Kant, Vico, F. H. Bradley and J. A. Smith. His father W. G. Collingwood, professor of fine arts at Reading University, was a student of Ruskin and was also an important influence.

Collingwood is most famous for his book The Idea of History, a work collated from various sources soon after his death by his pupil, T. M. Knox. The book came to be a major inspiration for philosophy of history in the English-speaking world. It is extensively cited, leading one commentator to ironically remark that Collingwood is coming to be "the best known neglected thinker of our time".^[1] Not just a philosopher of history, Collingwood was also a practicing historian and archaeologist, being during his time a leading authority on Roman Britain.

Collingwood held history as "recollection" of the "thinking" of a historical personage. Collingwood considered whether two different people can have the same thought and not just the same content, concluding that "there is no tenable theory of personal identity" preventing such a doctrine.

In The Principles of Art Collingwood held (following Croce) that works of art are essentially expressions of emotion. He portrayed art as a necessary function of the human mind, and considered it collaborative activity. In politics Collingwood defended the ideals of what he called liberalism "in its Continental sense":

The essence of this conception is ... the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity.^[2]

He also published The First Mate's Log (1940), an account of a yachting voyage in the Mediterranean, in the company of several of his students.

Arthur Ransome was a family friend, and learned to sail in their boat, subsequently teaching his sibling's children to sail. Ransome loosely based the Swallows in Swallows and Amazons on his sibling's children. Ransome also proposed to two of his three sisters.

After many years of ill health Collingwood died at Coniston, Lancashire in January 1943.

Main works published in his lifetime

• Religion and Philosophy (1916) ISBN 1-85506-317-4
• Roman Britain (1923, ed. 2, 1932) ISBN 0-8196-1160-3
• Speculum Mentis; or The Map of Knowledge (1924)
• Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925)
• The Archaeology of Roman Britain (1930)
• An Essay on Philosophic Method (1933, rev. ed. 2005). ISBN 1-85506-392-1
• Roman Britain and the English Settlements (with J. N. L. Myres, 1936, second edition 1937)
• The Principles of Art (1938) ISBN 0-19-500209-1
• An Autobiography (1939) ISBN 0-19-824694-3
• The First Mate's Log (1940)
• An Essay on Metaphysics (1940, revised edition 1998). ISBN 0-8191-3315-9
• The New Leviathan (1942, rev. ed. 1992) ISBN 0-19-823880-0

Posthumously-published works

• The Idea of Nature (1945) ISBN 0-19-500217-2
• The Idea of History (1946, revised edition 1993). ISBN 0-19-285306-6
• Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1964)
• Essays in the Philosophy of History (1965) ISBN 0-8240-6355-4
• Essays in Political Philosophy (1989) ISBN 0-19-823566-6
• The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History (2001) ISBN 0-19-924315-8
• The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology (2005) ISBN 0-19-926253-5

All 'revised' editions comprise the original text plus a new introduction and extensive additional material.

References

1. ^ Mink, Louis O. (1969). Mind, History, and Dialectic. Indiana University Press, 1.
2. ^ R. G. Collingwood (2005). "Man Goes Mad" in The Philosophy of Enchantment. Oxford University Press, 318.

External links

• Additional Articles and Documents by R. G. Collingwood
• "Robin George Collingwood" article by Giuseppina D'Oro in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Collingwood's Aesthetics" article by Gary Kemp in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Voice in the wilderness: RG Collingwood radio discussion from Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Robin Collingwood: Archaeologist of Roman Britain

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