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Although it is generally acknowledged that the coming of age of analytical philosophy of history as a flourishing enterprise in contemporary philosophical circles is due chiefly to the pioneering work of R.G. Collingwood, what Collingwood had to say about history in particular and the scientific study of it has sometimes been obscured by a concern with larger questions, such as whether Collingwood’s writings can be viewed as a single system or as successive but ultimately incompatible attempts at elaborating such a (...) system, whether and to what extent he was an old-fashioned idealist, and whether his thought did or did not undergo a radical conversion from idealism to historicism. In History as Re-Enactment, W. H. Dray attempts to re-examine Collingwood’s philosophy of history with a view to clarifying precisely what his contribution to this field amounts to, and where it fits in Collingwood’s lifelong attempt to achieve a rapprochement between philosophy and history. (shrink)