Online research in philosophy

This essay argues that R.G. Collingwood's remarks about genre are implausible, and that they stem, despite their apparent origin in his wider account of art, from his failure to take some of his own most important insights seriously enough. Some possible reasons for that failure are suggested; and it is shown that, once the relevant insights are given their proper weight, Collingwood's account commands the resources from which a plausible story about genre might have been constructed. To this extent, the present essay constitutes a defence of Collingwood's philosophy of art.

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?

The art and the artist according to Collingwood.

The status of art in Plato's philosophy has always been a difficult problem. As a matter of fact, he even threw the poets out from his ideal state, a passage that has led some interpreters to assess that Plato did not develop a proper philosophy of art. Nevertheless, R. G. Collingwood, wrote an article titled “Plato's Philosophy of Art”. How can it be? What could lead one of the most important aesthetic scholars of the first half of the twentieth century to make this thesis about Plato? To understand Collingwood's position at that time, I will review it in a new light: his own philosophy of art at that moment as it was propounded in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, a work he published that same year. I will also examine how Collingwood's position changed when he returned to the same subject in 1938, on the publication of The Principles of Art. Finally, I will end this article defending the correctness of Collingwood's earlier interpretation of Plato's position on art.