Abstract

Collingwood said that mind is always in development, and his now accessible unpublished manuscripts exemplify that statement. Prior to 1926, he held a realistic philosophy of history which regarded knowledge of the past as being based on concrete fact. By 1926, however, he began to reveal a Kantian influence by considering philosophy a universal and transcendental body of concepts which arise when anyone thinks about a subject. History is, then, transcendental as well as empirical. Collingwood then argued that only the present is real, and thus history can only be an ideal reconstruction of the past. He continued to explore until his death the implications of this last notion in studies of the relationship between philosophy and history and the problem of historical interpretation. He also made elaborate studies of folklore, anthropology, and cosmology. Appendix: a descriptive list of the Collingwood mss. in the Bodleian Library