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Full Version 16102013.Pdf (PDF, 1.804Mb) Old Problems Re-opened R. G. Collingwood and the History of Ideas Christopher Fear This work was submitted by Christopher Fear to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Politics in September, 2013. It is available for library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signed Dated ………… Word count: 89,881 - 1 - - 2 - Abbreviations Works by R. G. Collingwood Date of first publication RP Religion and Philosophy (1916) SM Speculum Mentis (1924) EPM An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933) PA The Principles of Art (1938) A An Autobiography (1939) EM An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) NL The New Leviathan - or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (1942) IH The Idea of History (1946) EPH Essays in the Philosophy of History (1965) EPP Essays in Political Philosophy (1989) PH The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (1999) L26 ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’ [1926] (1993) All other works referred to by title. See bibliography for full publication details. - 3 - My title refers primarily to the following passage in Collingwood’s Autobiography: But of course it was no longer a ‘closed’ subject. It was no longer a body of facts which a very, very learned man might know, or a very, very big book enumerate, in their completeness. It was an ‘open’ subject, an inexhaustible fountain of problems, old problems re-opened and new problems formulated that had not been formulated until now. Above all, it was a constant warfare against the dogmas, often positively erroneous, and always vicious in so far as they were dogmatic, of that putrefying corpse of historical thought, the ‘information’ to be found in text-books. 1 It refers also to an earlier passage from Collingwood’s essay ‘Croce’s Philosophy of History’: In the past the Oxford “Greats” school has stood for this ideal of the cross- fertilisation of history and philosophy, even when the coordination of the two sides has been worst, and the undergraduate has seemed to be merely reading two different schools at once, under tutors who regarded each other as rivals for his attention; but in the future the whole question will be reopened, and philosophy may either contract a new alliance with the natural sciences, or retire into single blessedness as an independent subject like Forestry or Geography, or force herself into the company of Modern History, disguised perhaps under the inoffensive name of Political Theory. 2 It refers also to a passage in An Essay on Metaphysics: “It represented the typical nineteenth- century conviction that all questions about fundamentals had been settled and must on no account be reopened”.3 1 A, p. 75 2 Essays in the Philosophy of History, William Debbins (ed.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 5 3 EM, p. 96 - 4 - Conventions It is greatly to the liberty of the author that doctoral theses may be written without the obligations and limitations of a house style guide. I have eschewed certain stylistic conventions of contemporary writing here for the sake of what I hope will be easy reading. The third person singular is given throughout as ‘he’, and the reader referred to as ‘he’, without any intended gender-political message. By using ‘he’ I do not intend to deny that women exist, that they read, or that they make equally wonderful academics; and I do not think that this traditional usage retards the legitimate causes of truly liberal feminism. I have left contracted forms – can’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, etc. – as they are in the spoken language of the world’s native English speakers, and as they are to be found in the written works of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hobbes, and William Shakespeare. I have also not made a rule of it, but have allowed context, emphasis, and tone to inform the decision to use ‘have not’ rather than ‘haven’t, or vice versa . I have eschewed as far as possible the jargon that is to be encountered at least somewhere in all of philosophy’s subfields. If ‘jargon’ is technical language misliked, ‘technical language’ is too often jargon legitimized by would-be technocratic experts. I hope that this means the reader will never have to ask himself ‘What does he mean?’, and that he will enjoy the benefit of seeing any errors of reasoning in the plain light of day, rather than suffer the need to decode my prose in order to discover them. There are, in Collingwood scholarship, debates over whether (and if so how) Collingwood should be referred to as an ‘idealist’, an ‘Hegelian’, a ‘Kantian’, or whether (and if so how) his philosophy is to be read as ‘historicist’, ‘dialectical’, and so on. I have not entered these debates here, and this is part of the reason why I have avoided these contested terms as far as I have been able to. For the philosophically-trained they can be misleading unless used with sometimes extensive qualification, and for the philosophically-untrained reader they are discouraging. Collingwood’s philosophy can be explicated without such terms – as his own writings demonstrate. The full titles of most of Collingwood’s published books begin with the word ‘ The ’ or ‘An ’: The Idea of History , The Principles of History , An Autobiography . Much of the time I have taken the liberty of dropping the article for the sake of normal English usage. So I have sometimes referred to ‘Collingwood’s Autobiography ’, ‘his Autobiography ’, ‘the Autobiography ’, and so on. Likewise I have sometimes referred to ‘his Essay on Philosophical Method’, though the full title is An Essay on Philosophical Method. I have preferred this small modification to the awkward formulation ‘Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method’. The convention of other Collingwood commentators is to retain the full title with article, though there have also been some who, I think unwisely, crop The Idea of History at the wrong end, resulting in The Idea . (Compared with such usages I doubt the reader will find my omission of articles very confusing.) Double quotation marks are reserved throughout for direct quotation, and single quotation marks for everything else including ‘scare quoting’.1 In quotation I have left all punctuation marks as they appear in the original. I have silently changed upper-case letters into lower-case where the beginning of a sentence is being incorporated into a running sentence of my own, unless I’ve thought meaning to be affected, in which case I’ve simply retained original capitalization even in the middle of sentences. I’ve used scare quotes for ‘question and answer’ in order to hold it together as a kind of concept, and where I have omitted them it’s because I’ve used the term in full as ‘the logic of question and answer’ or ‘the theory of question and answer’. And I have hyphenated it (as question-and-answer, usually without quotation marks) according to the norms of compound adjectives. 1 An example of this working nicely is A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography [1999] (Cambridge University Press, 2007) - 5 - Acknowledgements One cannot go through the process of writing a doctoral thesis without acquiring many friends, much good guidance, many valuable recommendations (and warnings), and – if one is lucky – some really inspiring enemies. One can never do them all full justice, either in acknowledgement or in the execution of what their advice envisaged. To my supervisors Prof. Iain Hampsher-Monk and Dr Edward Skidelsky are due thanks for their general guidance and advice on all my work including what appears here, and for checking that I have always said what I meant and meant what I’ve said. To Dr Robert Lamb I owe thanks for his comments on early thoughts and notes concerning the imaginary conversations between Collingwood, Skinner, and Mark Bevir, and for his encouragement to publish some of my work in the field. To Keith Sutherland I owe gratitude for helping me to get hold of otherwise hard-to-reach research materials. As well as to the teachings of these men, whatever traces of academic professionalism are to be found here are due to the examples of Dr Robin Douglass, Dr Christopher Nathan, and Stuart Ingham; while for comments and exchanges of various kinds that have significantly improved the content of this study compared to what it would otherwise have been I must also thank Prof. Dr Martin van Gelderen, Dr Dr h. c. Hans Erich Bödeker, and Miss Kate Berrisford. For the remaining mistakes and failures of the present work I embrace full responsibility. Finally this work would never have been embarked upon without the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And it could never have been completed without the general support and encouragement of my family; of other friends whom I haven’t named but perhaps ought to have; or without the encouragement, advice, patience, and sometimes blind faith of Miss Jessica Fowler. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/H020314/1] - 6 - Contents Part I Introductions i. Questions ii. Why study Collingwood? iii. Conception and design of the study iv. Warnings regarding method Part II The Logic of Question and Answer (Generically) i. The ‘questioning activity’ ii. The question-and-answer theory of logic iii.
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