James Mark Connelly

Connelly discusses the development of Collingwood’s conception of philosophical methodology and how his early reflections on the role and character of philosophical analysis gradually gave rise to his mature metaphilosophical views. He shows that concerns with second-order questions concerning the nature of philosophy were present from the very beginning and that Collingwood’s later metaphilosophical view gradually evolve from, rather than break away with, his earlier metaphilosophical reflections. The chapter provides a much-needed guide to understanding how Collingwood developed his mature metaphilosophical views concerning the nature of philosophy through his engagement with Oxford realism and logical positivism.

Collingwood's The New Leviathan is a difficult text. It comprises philosophy, political theory, political opinion and history in what is sometimes an uneasy amalgam. Despite its being the culmination of thirty years of work in ethics and political theory, the final text was clearly affected by the adverse circumstances under which it was written, these largely being Collingwood's illness which increasingly affected his ability to work as the writing of The New Leviathan progressed. This paper seeks to disentangle the composition of the book thereby shedding light on its distinctive character as the last substantial piece of philosophical work published in Collingwood's lifetime.

This article surveys and contextualizes the British idealists’ philosophical writings on language, aesthetics and emotions, starting with T. H. Green and concluding with Michael Oakeshott. It highlights ways in which their philosophical insights have been wrongly overlooked by later writers. It explores R. L. Nettleship’s posthumous publications in this field and notes that they exerted significant influences on British idealists and closely related figures, such as Bernard Bosanquet and R. G. Collingwood. The writing of other figures are also explored, not least F. H. Bradley and J. A. Smith. The article concludes by introducing in turn the remaining articles that are found in this special issue.

The philosophy of history is undergoing something of a revival. Much has happened since its heyday in the 1960s when methodological discussions concerning the structure of explanation in history and the natural sciences were central to the philosophical agenda. This introduction revisits Collingwood’s contribution to the philosophy of history, his views on the relation between science and history, and the possibility of historical knowledge suggesting his work is of enduring relevance to contemporary debates. It locates his contribution in the context of the hermeneutic tradition and locates his defence of the methodological autonomy of history in the context of recent debates concerning the relation between science and the history of the philosophy of science.

This paper examines some of the work of Walter Benjamin in the philosophy of history. It suggests that his work, including the famous?Theses on the Philosophy of History? contains important insights of interest to those engaged in reflections on history. Benjamin was concerned to argue against what he saw as the distorting effect of certain views in the philosophy of history and a belief in progress which he saw as having damaging practical effects. In this he was quite right. However, the importance of his work lay primarily not in philosophy of history in an analytical sense of the term, but in the substantive sense, that is, the sense in which claims are made concerning the directionality of the historical process. Benjamin sought to show that in this sense of the term, it was important to avoid belief in the necessity of progress. However, I argue that he overstated his case in his determination to avoid a philosophy of history committed to belief in progress. His implicit claim that a merely negative philosophy of history is possible proves to be an illusion because (whether negative or positive), a philosophy of history makes presuppositions about the directionality of history (or its absence) which go beyond the empirical evidence.

This volume is devoted to a critical discussion and re-appraisal of the work of Anglo-American Idealists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Idealism was the dominant philosophy in Britain and the entire English-speaking world during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The British Idealists made important contributions to logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. Their legacy awaits further exploration and reassessment, and this book is a contribution to this task. The essays in this collection display many aspects of contemporary concern with idealistic philosophy: they range from treatments of logic to consideration of the Absolute, personal idealism, the philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the work of the Anglo-American Idealists has once again been widely discussed and re-considered, and new pathways of research and investigation have been opened.

Descartes and Augustine. Stephen Menn. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. xvi + 415. £40.00. ISBN 0 521 41702 3 The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion. Daniel Fouke. E. J. Brill: Leiden, 1997. $93.50 hb. ISBN 90 04 106006 The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Edited by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp. xi + 428 with bibliography and index £40.00. ISBN 0–521–47151–6 Carnap's Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Alan W. Richardson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp. χ + 242. £35.00 hb. ISBN 0 521 43008 9 An Essay on Metaphysics. R. G. Collingwood. Revised edition, edited with an introduction by Rex Martin. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998. cv + 439 pp. £48. ISBN 0–19–823–561–5 Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Dominique Colas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. pp. xxx + 480 [orig. Le Glaive et le fléau: Généalogie du fanatisme et de la société civile. Paris, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1992]. £40.50 and £14.95. ISBN 0–8047–2734–1 cloth; ISBN 0–8047–2736–8 pb.

There are strong grounds for believing that Collingwood cannot have been the author of "The Theory of History." First, the "Theory of History" is a typescript, and while Smith had papers typed up from time to time, Collingwood generally did not. Second, Collingwood, who kept good records, did not refer to "The Theory of History" either in his Autobiography or in his detailed "List of Work Done." Third, Collingwood always held the firm belief that good philosophy could only arise out of a reflection upon the philosopher's own personal experience, yet the work, written in 1914 when Collingwood was busy working on archaeological excavations at Ambleside, contains no archaeological references. Fourth, the philosophical content of "The Theory of History" is anachronistic for the young Collingwood writing in 1914, for at that time he had no marked interest in the philosophy of history. Fifth, the semi-colon, used quite frequently by Collingwood and indicating a genuine stylistic characteristic, is used at a much less frequent rate by the author of the "The Theory of History."

This paper considers whether respect is a concept that can be applied fruitfully and cogently to nature and the environment. Through an examination of the idea of nature, respect and an analysis of Paul Taylor’s book Respect for Nature, it argues that, despite the attractiveness of the idea, the concept of respect cannot be coherently and systematically applied to the natural world and that, if a reasoned justification for a non-instrumental view of nature is to be sought, it must be sought elsewhere, perhaps in the notion of care rather than respect per se.