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40Between ontological hubris and epistemic humility: Collingwood, Kant and the role of transcendental argumentsBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (2): 336-357. 2019.This paper explores and defends a form of transcendental argument that is neither bold in its attempt to answer the sceptic, as ambitious transcendental strategies, nor epistemically humble, as modest transcendental strategies. While ambitious transcendental strategies seek to meet the sceptical challenge, and modest transcendental strategies accept the validity of the challenge but retreat to a position of epistemic humility, this form of transcendental argument denies the assumption that under…Read more
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305The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not eventsPhilosophical Explorations 21 (1): 160-169. 2018.It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because scie…Read more
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54Collingwood’s Critique of Scissors-and-Paste History Revisited in the Light of his Conception of MetaphysicsInternational Studies in Philosophy 32 (4): 23-45. 2000.
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70The Ontological Backlash: Why did Mainstream Analytic Philosophy Lose Interest in the Philosophy of History?Philosophia 36 (4): 403-415. 2008.This paper seeks to explain why mainstream analytic philosophy lost interest in the philosophy of history. It suggests that the reasons why the philosophy of history no longer commands the attention of mainstream analytical philosophy may be explained by the success of an ontological backlash against the linguistic turn and a view of philosophy as a form of conceptual analysis. In brief I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophy of history attracted the interest of mainstream analytical …Read more
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27Le fossé dans l’explication n’est pas épistémologique mais sémantiquePhilosophiques 36 (1): 183-192. 2009.This paper explores an alternative to the metaphysical challenge to physicalism posed by Jackson and Kripke and to the epistemological one exemplified by the positions of Nagel, Levine and Mcginn. On this alternative the mind-body gap is neither ontological nor epistemological, but semantic. I claim that it is because the gap is semantic that the mind body-problem is a quintessentially philosophical problem that is not likely to wither away as our natural scientific knowledge advances
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39Collingwood on philosophical knowledge and the enduring nature of philosophical problemsBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1). 2004.No abstract
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125The gap is semantic, not epistemologicalRatio 20 (2): 168-178. 2007.This paper explores an alternative to the metaphysical challenge to physicalism posed by Jackson and Kripke and to the epistemological one exemplified by the positions of Nagel, Levine and McGinn. On this alternative the mind‐body gap is neither ontological nor epistemological, but semantic. I claim that it is because the gap is semantic that the mind‐body problem is a quintessentially philosophical problem that is not likely to wither away as our natural scientific knowledge advances.1.
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1From Anticausalism to Causalism and BackIn Giuseppina D'Oro & Constantine Sandis (eds.), Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Non-causalism in the Philosophy of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 7-48. 2013.
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History and Idealism: Collingwood and OakeshottIn Malpass Jeff & Malpas Jeff (eds.), The Routledge Companion to hermenutics, Routledge. pp. 191-204. 2015.
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The Justificandum of the Human Sciences: Collingwood on Reasons for ActingCollingwood and British Idealism Studies 23 (1): 41-65. 2017.
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Collingwood’s Idealist Metaontology: Between Therapy and Armchair ScienceIn Soren Overgaard & Giuseppina D'Oro (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 211-228. 2017.
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63Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Non-causalism in the Philosophy of Action (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2013.
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137Collingwood's solution to the problem of mind-body dualismPhilosophia 32 (1-4): 349-368. 2005.This paper contrasts two approaches to the mind-body problem and the possibility of mental causation: the conceptual approach advocated by Collingwood/Dray and the metaphysical approach advocated by Davidson. On the conceptual approach to show that mental causation is possible is equivalent to demonstrating that mentalistic explanations possess a different logical structure from naturalistic explanations. On the metaphysical approach to show that mental causation is possible entails explaining h…Read more
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Beauties Of Nature And Beauties Of Art: On Kant And Hegel's AestheticsBulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 33 70-86. 1996.
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69The Myth of Collingwood's HistoricismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (6): 627-641. 2010.This paper seeks to clarify the precise sense in which Collingwood's “metaphysics without ontology” is a descriptive metaphysics. It locates Collingwood's metaphysics against the background of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics and then defends it against the claim that Collingwood reduced metaphysics to a form of cultural anthropology. Collingwood's metaphysics is descriptive not because it is some sort of historicised psychology that describes temporally par…Read more
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232Idealism and the philosophy of mindInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (5): 395-412. 2005.This paper defends an idealist form of non-reductivism in the philosophy of mind. I refer to it as a kind of conceptual dualism without substance dualism. I contrast this idealist alternative with the two most widespread forms of non-reductivism: multiple realisability functionalism and anomalous monism. I argue first, that functionalism fails to challenge seriously the claim for methodological unity since it is quite comfortable with the idea that it is possible to articulate a descriptive theo…Read more
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45Collingwood, Metaphysics, and HistoricismDialogue 41 (1): 71. 2002.RÉSUMÉ: Cet article discute l'idée que la philosophie tardive de Collingwood soit d'orientation historiciste et relativiste. Je soutiens que cette accusation de relativisme historique est basée sur deux erreurs, l'une exégétique et l'autre philosophique. L'erreur exégétique est le résultat de l'hypothèse d'une prétendue «conversion radicale». L'erreur philosophique repose sur la conception selon laquelle il n'y a pas de différences substantielles entre le projet d'une métaphysique descriptive et…Read more
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55In defence of the agent-centred perspectiveMetaphilosophy 36 (5): 652-667. 2005.: This article explores certain issues that arise at the borderline between conceptual analysis and metaphysics, where answers to questions of a conceptual nature compete with answers to questions of an ontological or metaphysical nature. I focus on the way in which three philosophers, Kant, Collingwood and Davidson, articulate the relationship between the conceptual question "What are actions?" and the metaphysical question "How is agency possible?" I argue that the way in which one handles the…Read more
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75Re-enactment and radical interpretationHistory and Theory 43 (2). 2004.This article discusses R. G. Collingwood’s account of re-enactment and Donald Davidson’s account of radical translation. Both Collingwood and Davidson are concerned with the question “how is understanding possible?” and both seek to answer the question transcendentally by asking after the heuristic principles that guide the historian and the radical translator. Further, they both agree that the possibility of understanding rests on the presumption of rationality. But whereas Davidson’s principle…Read more
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26Davidson and the Autonomy of the Human SciencesIn Dialogues with Davidson: New Perspectives on his Philosophy, Mit Press. pp. 283-296. 2011.This chapter explores the kind of nonreductivism defended by Davidson and compares it with that which predominated in mid-century. Davidson’s argument for the autonomy of the human sciences is contrasted with the one developed by R. G. Collingwood as presented through the interpretative efforts of W. H. Dray. It is argued here that Davidson’s arguments against the anticausalist consensus that dominated the first half of the twentieth century were not conclusive and that the success of causalism …Read more
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73Between the old metaphysics and the new empiricism: Collingwood's defence of the autonomy of philosophyRatio 25 (1): 34-50. 2012.Collingwood has failed to make a significant impact in the history of twentieth century philosophy either because he has been dismissed as a dusty old idealist committed to the very metaphysics the analytical school was trying to leave behind, or because his later work has been interpreted as advocating the dissolution of philosophy into history. I argue that Collingwood's key philosophical works are a sustained attempt to defend the view that philosophy is an autonomous discipline with a distin…Read more
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42The Philosopher and the Grapes: On Descriptive Metaphysics and Why It Is Not ‘Sour Metaphysics’International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (4): 586-599. 2013.There is a widespread view according to which descriptive metaphysics is not ‘real’ metaphysics. This paper argues that first-order philosophical disagreements cannot be settled without re-opening the debate about the nature of philosophical enquiry and that failure to scrutinize and justify one’s own metaphilosophical stance leads to arguments which are circular or question begging.
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38On Collingwood's Rehabilitation of the Ontological ArgumentIdealistic Studies 30 (3): 173-188. 2000.The paper is divided in two parts. In the first I consider the nature of Ryle's attack on Collingwood's appropriation of the ontological argument and Collingwood's defence in the unpublished correspondence. In the second, I go beyond the confines of the Ryle-Collingwood exchange in the mid 'thirties to say something much more general about the nature of Collingwood's metaphysics as well as to advance an explanation of the compatibility of Collingwood's combined defence of descriptive metaphysics…Read more
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93Collingwood on re-enactment and the identity of thoughtJournal of the History of Philosophy 38 (1): 87-101. 2000.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 87-101 [Access article in PDF] Collingwood on Re-Enactment and The Identity of Thought Giuseppina D'oro University of Keele Collingwood's The Idea of History is often discussed in the context of the issue of the reducibility/non-reducibility of explanations in the social sciences to explanations in the natural sciences. In the 1950s and 60s, following the publication of Hempel's influe…Read more
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