James Mark Connelly

R.G. Collingwood is not normally associated with analytic philosophy, neither negatively nor positively. He neither regarded himself, nor was regarded by his contemporaries and their successors, as an analytical philosopher. However, the story is more interestingly complex than this, both because Collingwood is one of the few pre-analytics in the UK who continues to be of interest to current analytical philosophers, especially in relation to the philosophy of art and history and his conception of metaphysics, and because he mounted a critique of analytical philosophy in the years of its emergence

abstract In what follows I respond to Henry Shue's paper by focusing on three principal themes. The first is the relation of philosophical theory to practice, in which I agree that philosophers have to run the risks attendant upon applying reason to concrete cases. The second is the use of examples in moral philosophy, in particular the example used in the justification of torture as an exception; here I draw distinctions between different types of examples in philosophy and the uses to which they are put. Thirdly, in a brief consideration of our responses to climate change I suggest that, contra Shue, we are not being asked to go beyond a normal requirement so much as to re-establish the boundaries of what counts as normal.

This is a big book, conceived on a grand scale. Sprigge does not fight shy of addressing the large central issues. He takes James and Bradley head on and expounds their philosophy without compromise and without assuming that the only way we can appreciate them is by making them more palatable to the modern mind by watering down what they wrote. While he relates their thought to modern philosophical concerns he does not presuppose that modern philosophical concerns as such should act as the arbiter of what counts as philosophical good sense. In other words, we can learn from Bradley and James, whether or not they could also learn from us.

In so far as Collingwood is branded an ‘idealist’, the corresponding assumption is that he subscribed to the broad themes associated with the ‘English idealists or Hegelians’; in so far as he is thought to have broken free from their pernicious influence he is regarded as a proto-Kuhn or Wittgenstein who saw the error of his early ways. This paper suggests that neither picture is fully accurate, and that while the figure of F.H. Bradley perhaps played a more significant part in Collingwood’s philosophical development than is often recognised, his role was that of a spur or challenge to his thinking. Coming to terms with Bradley was a struggle throughout his philosophical career. I suggest that Collingwood took from Bradley the dual problematic of the method appropriate to philosophical thought and the tangled question of the nature of metaphysics. These were both problems which he wrestled with throughout his life, and Bradley’s work can be seen as setting the agenda for his thought on these matters.

‘The doubtful story of successive events’. With these words Bernard Bosanquet is often taken to have damned historical knowledge to oblivion. Although it is undeniably true that Bosanquet uttered these words and saw them into print, it is much less clear what he intended their import to be and whether he intended to damn history as a form of knowledge as such. Although he wrote little directly which can be construed as ‘philosophy of history’, he developed views both implicitly and explicitly which bear on this question. My concern in this paper is to show that Bosanquet’s animosity to history derived not from a desire to condemn, but from a desire to draw more from history than the historiography of his time would, in good philosophical conscience, allow him to. His words were words of disappointment and despair, of thwarted hope, rather than outright rejection. I shall argue that Bosanquet needed an account of historical experience to flesh out his account of the concrete universal. A re-telling of the story of Bosanquet and history shows how, if it had been possible for him to draw together unresolved strands in his thinking, he could have affirmed historical experience as ‘the heart beat of the absolute’. Following Foster I shall claim that he was ultimately committed to this, but was reluctant or unable to draw it out explicitly from his leading doctrines.