R.G. Collingwood, philosophy of history

It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter are the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood's claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not actions. It argues that Collingwood's defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a distinct form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event.

Die Stoßrichtung von Gadamers Antwort auf den Historismus bleibt in der Forschung ein umstrittenes Thema: Während seine philosophische Hermeneutik einerseits beschuldigt wird, lediglich die Aporien des Historismus zu radikalisieren, sehen andere in ihr die endgültige Überwindung der Problematik. Dieses Essay zeichnet die Linien von Gadamers Kritik anhand einer konkreten, aber heute weitgehend vergessenen Auseinandersetzung mit einer zeitgenössischen Gestalt des Historismus nach. Die sogenannte Problemgeschichte des Neukantianismus diente Gadamer nämlich schon in den 1920er Jahren, aber auch in Wahrheit und Methode (1960) als Folie, um sein Verhältnis zum Historismus zu klären. In einem ersten Schritt wird mit Nicolai Hartmann der meist ungenannte Gegner Gadamers identifiziert. In einem zweiten Schritt wird Gadamers Kritik an Hartmann rekonstruiert, die seine Position als einen Historismus zweiten Grades verständlich macht.

The nature of Gadamer’s response to the challenge of historicism remains a controversial issue. While some scholars claim that his critique only leads deeper into the aporia of historicism, others credit him with overcoming the problem. This essay will elucidate Gadamer’s response to historicism by examining his nearly forgotten critique of a contemporary version of historicism, namely, neo-Kantian Problemgeschichte. As early as the 1920s and again in Truth and Method (1960), Problemgeschichte served as Gadamer’s counterexample by which his own response to historicism was discussed. First, this essay will identify the mostly anonymous addressee of Gadamer’s critique as Nicolai Hartmann. And second, it will give an account of Gadamer’s critique of Hartmann in order to reveal Gadamer’s position as a kind of second-degree historicism.

This long paper makes the following claims on Collingwood's theoretical and methodological approach to the study of human societies: 1. All social scientific research has both a historical and a non-historical component, which we may call, in the restricted sense of the word, 'scientific'. The scientific component is general, the historical one particular or concrete (see proposition 5). The scientific component is always subordinated to the historical one. – 2. The subject-matter of history (understood as the historical component of social scientific research) is both multiple and single. On the one hand, it is multiple for it divides itself into more or less distinct areas of cultural activity -- mainly art, technology, science, philosophy, law, politics, mores. On the other hand, it is single, for these areas, although distinct, are not separated; they interact in many ways, and those interactions are what the historian studies. – 3. Each cultural area, as well as their interactions, evolve in what is almost always a progressive sequence. Nonetheless various forms of regression, recession and decline also take place. Humans keep struggling between civilization and barbarism. This back and forth also belongs to the subject-matter of history. – 4. The actions of humans, whose products are res gestae ('things achieved') are always concrete solutions to equally concrete problems faced by individuals and groups of individuals who also are concrete, ie situated on a given cultural level. There is no greater fallacy than to conceive problems faced by people as 'general' or people facing problems as 'general human beings' (see proposition 1). By the way, cultural areas are defined by such problems (see proposition 2). – 5. Concrete solutions to concrete problems make up human actions which historians (or social scientists insofar as they are historians) can only identify, interpret and evaluate by means of normative theories ('criteriological sciences'). Those theories are eminently applicable to the processes of civilization and barbarism themselves (see proposition 3), for these processes are also normative ideas. – 6. Normative theories are not only the instrument through which we can identify, interpret and evaluate res gestae (see proposition 4); they are themselves res gestae. In that sense propositions 1-5 apply to normative theories as well, and so they also belong to the subject-matter of history. – 7. The identification, interpretation and evaluation of the solutions to concrete problems (including the solutions to the concrete problems solved by the normative theories themselves) is all that historians as historians do. And all that historians as historians do is to solve concrete problems (those of historical research), which belong as such also to the subject-matter of history ('second-order history'). – 8. There always is some décalage between the cultural level of the historian and the cultural level of the human beings (including other historians) whom he or she studies. Such décalage is sometimes huge, and we should never hide it. On the contrary, it has to be faced with courage and lucidity.

Along with utilitarianism, British idealism was the most important philosophical and practical movement in Britain and its Empire during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Even though the British idealists have regained some of their standing in the history of philosophy, their own historical theories still fail to receive the deserved scholarly attention. This article helps to fill that major gap in the literature. Understanding historiography as concerning the appropriate modes of enquiring into the recorded past, this article analyses the key historiographical commitments that underpin the writings of the early T.H. Green (section two), Edward Caird (section three), and F.H. Bradley (sections four and five). Section six explores the influence of Bradley’s historiography. These approaches are linked by the belief that all thought can be properly understood only by critical historians who possess the appropriate tools with which to distinguish permanently valid truths from the transient imperfections with which those truths are mixed. A crucial division between them is the invocation of a neo-Hegelian Geist by the early Green and Caird, and Bradley’s reliance on a progressive human nature. Moreover, the article establishes that R.G. Collingwood’s highly influential theories of ‘absolute presuppositions’ and ‘re-enactment’ were taken largely from Bradley’s historiography.

The Erklären/Verstehen (explanation/understanding) distinction is often discussed in the context of the defence of the autonomy of the human sciences in the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy but it is rarely connected to the defence of the autonomy of historical explanations articulated by Collingwood and Oakeshott. Unlike earlier British idealists Collingwood and Oakeshott are concerned not in the metaphysics of time but in the methodology of history. This contribution locates their defence of the autonomy of historical understanding against the background of their commitment to a form of conceptual idealism. Against the background of an idealism which is purely conceptual (not causal or ontological) they argue that history is a form of experience with a distinctive method and subject matter. Both Collingwood and Oakeshott reject empiricist epistemology and argue that historical understanding is inferential not factual and that the inferences at work in history are different in kind from the inductive inferences at work in the natural sciences. But their rejection of the fact/value distinction presupposed by empiricist epistemology does not lead them to endorse any relativist conclusion concerning the possibility of knowing the past.

This book provides an exposition and critical examination of Collingwood's philosophy of history, in which Collingwood's views are read in the light of his metaphilosophy. Collingwood's philosophy of history is also located in relation to recent and current philosophy. Although the author argues that Collingwood's conception of the subject matter of history may require some revision, he is generally sympathetic to the aims and methods of Collingwood's project. Indeed, the author hopes to demonstrate that these aims and methods are still of great value.

"Pergunta e Resposta" é a tradução do capítulo V intitulado “Question and Answer” da obra de Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943) intitulada An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 29-43). Este capítulo é de suma importância para os estudiosos da filosofia hermenêutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer, uma vez que este desenvolveu sua lógica de pergunta e resposta em partes partindo desse escrito de Collingwood.

R G Collingwood is an important twentieth century historian, archaeologist and philosopher whose works are the subject of continued interest, analysis and study. There is an unquestionable need to support this research activity with the provision of a reference guide which is fully up-to-date, informed and authoritative. The Companion will therefore list all primary and secondary material relevant to the study of Collingwood in all his fields of expertise - historical theory, philosophy and archaeology. It will also provide a guide to archive material relevant to his life, together with sources and locations. The resulting volume will provide an essential companion to the understanding of the life and thought of R G Collingwood.

Research has shown that students are not always adequately prepared to think critically in courses related to social studies.  Students of history end up reading the works of popular historians rather than assessing arguments and concepts that will enable them to think historically.  This alternative way of assessment is based not only on Primary and Secondary sources but on a process known as the
Re-enactment Method.