Rex Martin's Reading of Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics

In his substantial editor's introduction to the revised edition of R.G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics (hereafter EM), Rex Martin offers a detailed account of this work and its relationship to Collingwood's other writings, and in particular, to his earlier Essay on Philosophical Method (hereafter EPM). In what follows I shall take issue with key aspects of Martin's reading. But let me say at the outset that I found his discussion enormously stimulating: it provoked me to interrogate the text with specific questions in mind, and to think much more carefully about both Collingwood's aims and his particular arguments and examples. It led me, in fact, to develop my own account of Collingwood's reasoning in EM, which has since been published as 'Collingwood's Conception of Presuppositional Analysis' (hereafter CCPA). In the present paper I shall draw on that account in offering a critique of Martin's reading.