Metaphysics is often understood as an inquiry into the fundamental structures of reality. Collingwood, by contrast, defends a view of metaphysics on which its role is not to advance knowledge of fundamental reality but to deepen our understanding of the presuppositions on which knowledge rests. On Collingwood’s view, knowledge requires explanation, explanations are answers to questions, and questions rest on presuppositions. The metaphysician’s task is to trace the entailment relations that hold between answers, the questions they seek to answer, and the presuppositions that give rise to the questions characteristic of different forms of knowledge. This exposes misunderstandings which arise when answers to a question of one kind are erroneously taken to be in conflict with answers to questions of a different kind, ones resting on different presuppositions and pursuing different explanatory goals. This chapter outlines Collingwood’s conception of presuppositional analysis and his distinctive views of the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics. It also explores affinities between Collingwood’s conception of metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s hinge epistemology.

I begin by considering the connection between Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics and A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Knox and Donagan believe that “between 1936 and 1938 Collingwood radically changed his mind about the relation of philosophy to history.” Donagan contends that this break stemmed from Collingwood’s having “come to endorse Ayer’s view that the propositions of traditional metaphysics are unverifiable.” Recently, Vanheeswijck and Beaney have claimed that Collingwood in effect endorsed Ayer’s verificationism. There is a considerable gulf between their claims and my own view of what Collingwood thought about logical positivism. In my view, Collingwood denied logical positivism flat-out. My chapter lays out and assesses the main points Vanheeswijck and Beaney use to support their view. I develop a viable alternative, one that takes account of Collingwood’s treatment of absolute presuppositions (in particular, on the vexed question of whether they can be determined to be true or false) and at the same time avoids the conclusion that Collingwood had, mistakenly, bought into logical positivism in his discussion of absolute presuppositions.