This is the first comprehensive study of the political philosophy of the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, best known for his contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history. However his political thought, and in particular his book The New Leviathan, have been neglected, even dismissed in some quarters. Professor Boucher argues for the importance of this political theory and provides a perspicuous account of its development and originality. He contends that The New Leviathan is an attempt to reconcile philosophy (...) and history, theory and practice. Collingwood's distinctive contribution to modern political and social thought is seen as his sustained project of distinguishing utility from right, and right from duty; the passion for history coincides with the ethical thought because Collingwood wishes to identify dutiful, or moral, action with a historical civilization. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript material, this book will prove invaluable to political philosophers and intellectual historians. (shrink)

This is the long-awaited publication of a set of writings by the British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) on critical, anthropological, and cultural themes only hinted at in his previously available work. At the core are six essays on folktale and magic in which Collingwood applies the principles of his philosophy of history to problems in the long-term evolution of human society and culture. The volume opens with three substantial introductory essays by the editors, authorities in their various (...) fields, who provide their explanatory and contextual notes to guide the reader through the texts. The Philosophy of Enchantment highlights the broad range of Collingwood's intellectual engagements, their integration, and their relevance to current areas of debate in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, social and literary history, and anthropology. (shrink)

James Connelly and Giuseppina D'Oro present a revised edition of R. G. Collingwood's classic work of 1933, supplementing the original text with important related writings from Collingwood's manuscripts which appear here for the first time. The editors also contribute a substantial new introduction, and the volume will be welcomed by all historians of twentieth-century philosophy.

Published here for the first time is much of a final and long-anticipated work on philosophy of history by the great Oxford philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood. The original text of this uncompleted work has only recently been discovered. It is accompanied by further, shorter writings on historical knowledge and inquiry. A lengthy editorial introduction sets these writings in their context, and discusses philosophical questions to which they give rise.

One of the great Oxford philosopher's finest works, Essay on Metaphysics considers the nature of philosophy, and puts forward Collingwood's original and influential theories of causation, presuppositions, and the logic of question and answer. This new edition includes three fascinating unpublished pieces that illuminate and amplify the Essay.

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to completing his life's work on the philosophy of history. It was a reaction to the Second World War and the threat which Nazism and Fascism constituted to civilization. The book draws upon many years of work in moral and political philosophy and attempts to establish the multiple and complex connections between the levels of (...) consciousness, society, civilization, and barbarism. Collingwood argues that traditional social contract theory has failed to account for the continuing existence of the non-social community and its relation to the social community in the body politic. He is also critical of the tendency within ethics to confound right and duty. The publication of additional manuscript material in this revised edition demonstrates in more detail how Collingwood was determined to show that right and duty occupy different levels of rational practical consciousness. The additional material also contains Collingwood's unequivocal rejection of relativism. (shrink)

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to ...

This treatise on aesthetics criticizes various psychological theories of art, offers new theories and interpretations, and draws important inferences concerning ...

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to ...

Collingwood published this article the same year that he published his first book on Aesthetics: "Outlines of a Philosophy of Art". The article can be divided in two main sections. In the first one Collingwood defends the existence of a Philosophy of Art in Plato's Republic, in close relation to the theory of reality expounded by Plato in the Book. From Collingwood's point of view, Plato understood art as "an appearance of an appearance", closely related to imagination, and as a (...) symbol of truth. The second section is a critique of Plato's conception previously presented from Collingwood's own perspective. (shrink)

This book is his remarkable diary of that voyage.

Had I not read that book in the months leading up to my university finals I might never have gained that real enthusiasm and excitement for ideas which has possessed me ever since. Before that time I played with the academic world in a desultory fashion, moving the thoughts, thinkers and theories in front of me as though they were merely so many counters. After I read Collingwood everything changed, and I believe the same can be true for any of (...) its readers. (shrink)

Davidson's seminal essay "Actions, Reasons and Causes" brought about a paradigm shift in the theory of action. Before Davidson the consensus was that the fundamental task of a theory of action was to elucidate the concept of action and event explanation. The debate concerning the nature of action explanation thus took place primarily in the philosophy of history and social science and was focussed on purely methodological issues. After Davidson it has been assumed that the fundamental challenge for the theory (...) of action is to answer not the conceptual question "what does it mean to explain something as an action?", but a metaphysical question, namely, "how is causal over-determination by the mental and the physical possible?". I argue that the two main considerations Davidson provides for construing the question posed by the action/event distinction in metaphysical rather than conceptual terms are inconclusive and that much is to be learned from the conceptual approach championed by Collingwood and Dray in the context of their philosophy of history. (shrink)

This paper defends an idealist form of non-reductivism in the philosophy of mind. I refer to it as a kind of conceptual dualism without substance dualism. I contrast this idealist alternative with the two most widespread forms of non-reductivism: multiple realisability functionalism and anomalous monism. I argue first, that functionalism fails to challenge seriously the claim for methodological unity since it is quite comfortable with the idea that it is possible to articulate a descriptive theory of the mind. Second, that (...) as an attempt to graft conceptual mind-body dualism onto a monistic metaphysics, the idealist alternative bears some similarities to anomalous monism, but that it is superior to it because it is not vulnerable to the charge of epiphenomenalism. I conclude that this idealist alternative should be given serious consideration by those who remain unconvinced that a successful defence of the non-reducibility of the mental is compatible with the pursuit of a naturalistic agenda. (shrink)

This paper argues that Collingwood's philosophy of mind offers an interesting and compelling account of the nature of the mind and of the irreducibility of the mental, an account whose viability and relevance to contemporary debates ought to be given serious consideration. I suggest that the reason why Collingwood's contribution to the philosophy of mind has been neglected is due to the fact that his philosophy of mind is widely, even if mistakenly, regarded as the target of Ryle's attacks on (...) the dogma of the ghost in the machine and proceed to undermine the assumption that Collingwood is a twentieth century adherent of the dogma. (shrink)

Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience re-visits Collingwood's body of work and locates it in the context of the fundamental problems of philosophy and shows that Collingwood is both an influential and key philosophical figure of the twentieth century.

Even if we reject the Wollheimian reading of Collingwood as an Idealist in the ontology of art, it remains puzzling how his non-Idealist ontology fits with his idea of art as expression. In trying to clarifying these matters, I argue that (i) the work of art, for Collingwood, is an activity, not the product of an activity; (ii) puzzling features of the Principles arise from attempts to reconcile this claim with the idea of art as expression while preserving the art/craft (...) distinction; and (iii) Collingwood's principal concern in the Principles is with the role of imagination in experience. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood's theory of re-enactment has long been understood as an important contribution to the philosophy of history. It has also been challenging to understand how re-enactment is operationalized in the practice of understanding past actors or, indeed, other minds occupying less remote regions of our experiences. Sebastian Rödl has recently articulated a compelling defence of second person ascription, arguing that it is, in form, analogous to first person understanding. By Rödl's lights, second person understanding follows the same order (...) of reason as its first person counterpart. In this paper I argue that Rödl's case for second person understanding, and its relationship to the first person point of view, is at once compelling in its own right but also helpful in explaining how re-enactment may be operationalized. (shrink)

I defend the idea that Collingwood's discussion of self-knowledge implies that meaning is normative. Against the view that treats the social as primitive in explaining a normativity of meaning thesis, I argue that Collingwood is an internalist about epistemic justification. Collingwood's internalism about epistemic justification and meaning is normative, but its character involves a logical-epistemic relation between use and meaning. I suggest that this view is well represented by Collingwood's idea of history.

According to R. G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art, art is the expression of emotion--a much-criticized view. I attempt to provide some groundwork for a defensible modern version of such a theory via some novel further criticisms of Collingwood, including the exposure of multiple ambiguities in his main concept of expression of emotion, and a demonstration that, surprisingly enough, his view is unable to account for genuinely creative artistic activities. A key factor in the reconstruction is a replacement of (...) the concept of expression with that of interpretation: what artists do is to interpret, rather than express, their initial emotions, in creative ways that may go far beyond their initial impulses. Thus more broadly the paper attempts to show that the concept of interpretation is just as central to understanding artistic creativity as it is in the analysis of the critical appreciation of artworks. (shrink)

This book explains and defends a central ideas in the theory of history put forward by R. G. Collingwood, perhaps the foremost philosopher of history in the 20th century. Professor Dray analyses critically the idea of re-enactment, explores the limits of its applicability, and determines its relationship to other key Collingwoodian ideas, such as the role of imagination in historical thinking, and the indispensability of a point of view.

"This book addresses the apparent contradiction in moral condemnation of good artworks.

This paper seeks to explain why mainstream analytic philosophy lost interest in the philosophy of history. It suggests that the reasons why the philosophy of history no longer commands the attention of mainstream analytical philosophy may be explained by the success of an ontological backlash against the linguistic turn and a view of philosophy as a form of conceptual analysis. In brief I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophy of history attracted the interest of mainstream analytical (...) philosophers because the defence of the autonomy of historical explanation championed by the likes of Collingwood, Dray, Melden, Winch, Von Wright and others was in tune with the predominant conception of philosophy as a conceptual enterprise concerned primarily with clarifying different explanatory practices. As this conception of philosophy as an essentially conceptual enterprise became recessive, the purely methodological non-reductivism advocated by defenders of the autonomy of history was accused of ontological escapism and the discussion concerning the autonomy of psychological explanations became the province of the philosophy of mind and action. (shrink)

One of the main functions that introductory chemistry courses havefulfilled during the past century has been to provide evidence for the generalvalidity of 'the atomic hypothesis.' A second function has been to demonstratethat an analytical approach has wide applicability in rationalizing many kindsof phenomena. Following R.G. Collingwood, these two functions can be recognizedas related to a philosophical 'cosmology' (worldview, weltanshauung) thatbecame dominant in the late Renaissance. Recent developments in many areasof science, and in chemistry, have emphasized the central importance of (...) understandingsynthetic, developmental, and evolutionary aspects of nature. This paperargues that these scientific developments, and changes in other aspects of culture,amount to a widespread shift to an alternative cosmology, a quite different generalworldview. To the extent that this is the case, introductory chemistry coursesought to be changed in fundamental ways. Rather than having a main focus onanalysis to microscopic components, introductory chemistry instruction shouldemphasize current scientific understanding of the (synthetic) evolutionary originsof the present world. This altered approach would provide good preparation forfuture professional work, while also making better contact with the perceivedconcerns of students. (shrink)