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Collingwood and Eternal Philosophical Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Eugene F. Bertoldi
Eugene F. Bertoldi
Affiliation:
Campion College, University of Regina
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Extract

In some of his last publications, R. G. Collingwood takes the position that problems in philosophy are not eternal. Such a denial, in the context of the controversies concerning the overall interpretation of Collingwood's work, is significant for at least two reasons: it seems to suggest an “atomistic” view of the history of philosophy on Collingwood's part, perhaps one that resembles that of the history of science as offered in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Also, the denial seems to reverse Collingwood's earlier views which insisted on a philosophia perennis, and this would support those who maintain that at some point Collingwood's thought underwent a “radical conversion”.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1985 , pp. 387 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1985

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References

1 Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962)Google Scholar.

2 Rubinoff, L., Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics (Toronto, 1970), 14ff., discusses the history of the “radical conversion” hypothesisGoogle Scholar.

3 Harris, E. E., “Collingwood on Eternal Problems”, The Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1951), 235, 239CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography (London, 1939)Google Scholar.

5 Collingwood, R. G., An Essay on Metaphysics (Chicago, 1972) (hereafter EM). EM dates from a year after the Autobiography: the earlier views are those of An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford, 1933) (hereafter EPM), e.g., 189ff., and Speculum Mentis (Oxford, 1924)Google Scholar.

6 Toulmin, S., “Conceptual Change and the Problem of Relativity”, in Krausz, G., ed., Critical Essays in the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar.

7 Collingwood, Autobiography, 62.

8 For example, in the Autobiography, G. E. Moore's “The Refutation of Idealism”: “an important document of the (realist) school … this purported to be a criticism of Berkeley. Now the position actually criticized in that article is not Berkeley's position. … The same thing happened with the attacks on Bradley in Cook Wilson's logical lectures” (22). In general the realist when criticizing another philosopher's views discusses only the critic's own perversion of those views, “… the realist could never distinguish between the perversion and the reality, because the perversion was simply the reality as seen through his distorting spectacles” (73).

9 EM, 86: “The metaphysicians who believe in eternal problems are bad historians, or they would not believe in eternal problems. Being bad historians they do not know what the problems of the great classical metaphysicians were. They read into them the problems of their own time, or rather the time just before their own.”

10 EM, 72.

11 EPM, 25 (my emphasis).

12 Collingwood, Autobiography, 64.

13 EM, 44.

14 Although he does say that Hume's “science of nature” was “falsified by the assumption that human minds had everywhere and at all times worked like those of eighteenth century Europeans” (Collingwood, Autobiography, 116 [my emphasis]).

15 Those who believe in “a certain repertory of problems which are ‘the’ problems of metaphysics” are like Kant “stuck fast in the grip of illusion” (EM, 64–65).

16 EM, 45.

17 EPM, 33.

18 Collingwood, . Autobiography, 60.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 68.

20 Ibid., 37. Similarly, the “logical efficacy” of a presupposition is that it causes questions t o arise: this efficacy is not dependent upon the truth of the presupposition but only on its being presupposed (EM, 27–28).

21 Collingwood, , Autobiography, 71.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 22.

23 Mink, L. O., Mind, Dialectic and History (Bloomington, 1969), interprets Colling-wood's absolute presuppositions as functionally similar to Kantian a prioris (144ff.). In this he was anticipated by Harris, “Eternal Problems”, 236–237Google Scholar.

24 Harris, , “Eternal Problems”, 234–235.Google Scholar

25 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford. 1972), 63Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 63.

27 EPM, 226.

28 EM, 48. Collingwood describes the change in absolute presuppositions as “the most radical change a man can undergo, and entails the abandonment of all his most firmly established habits and standards for thought and action”.

29 Harris, “Eternal Problems”, 238: “Experience as we have it is prior to the absolute presuppositions, and presupposed in them”. Toulmin's discussion of certain presuppositions as “disciplinary” rather than “theoretical” seems to me much more faithful t o Collingwood's intent. But he takes too literally the notion that absolute presuppositions cannot be justified. My position is that the rejection of eternal philosophieal problems is itself an exercise in justification. See Toulmin, “Conceptual Change”, 213ff.

30 EM, 73.

31 Ibid., 74.

32 Ibid., 63.

33 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 220. This would entail “the false view of history as a story of successive events or a spectacle of changes” and “No t the least of the errors contained in the science of human nature is its claim to establish a framework to which all future history must conform …”. But, it must als o be said, the theory of the “overlap” of philosophieal classes that is developed in EPM might well be seen as an attempt to provide a logic of some sorts of conceptual change. This is supported by the claim, in Collingwood's attack on the realists, that they saw the “sameness” of instances of an eternal problem as the sameness of a “universal” (Autobiography, 62); the theory of the overlap of classes is directed against just such a view. Nonetheless, the view presented here is that the rejection of eternal philosophieal problems is not vitiated by the absenc e of such a theory, and, in fact, Collingwood never feels it necessary to refer to the theory of the overlap of classes in those places where he rejects eternal problems.

34 Tomlin, E. W. F.. The Approach to Metaphysics (London, 1947), IxGoogle Scholar.

35 Mink, , Mind, Dialectic and History, 134Google Scholar, argues, successfully in my opinion, that the making of an absolute presupposition is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition of some question's arising. See also EM, 197: “absolute presuppositions … are catalytic agents which the mind must bring out of its own resources to the manipulation of what i s called ‘civilization’ …”.

36 Saying this does not necessitate that the historian can never discover the absolute presupposition of a given question: the relation of logical efficacy is a dialectical historical one that is prospectively open, but retrospectively closed. This means that the historian sees that the historical agent must have presupposed such and such in addressing acertain question; but the agent himself is not compelled by his presuppositions to ask this question. See Mink, Mind, Dialectic and History, 133-–134.

37 These are the usual alternatives offered a s explaining conceptual change. i.e., that such change is rational and necessary, or that it is accidental and causal. While it is true that for Collingwood histor y is rational, this is not the abstract rationality of the Enlightenment; and, as he himself said of Hegel, “This must be remembered when it is said that Hegel's view of history is a rationalistic view; his rationalism is of a very curious kind, because it conceives irrational elements as essential to reason itself” (The Idea of History, 117).