Abstract

In his substantial editor's introduction to the revised edition of R.G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics , Rex Martin offers a detailed account of this work and its relationship to Collingwood's other writings, and in particular, to his earlier Essay on Philosophical Method . In what follows I shall take issue with key aspects of Martin's reading. But let me say at the outset that I found his discussion enormously stimulating: it provoked me to interrogate the text with specific questions in mind, and to think much more carefully about both Collingwood's aims and his particular arguments and examples. It led me, in fact, to develop my own account of Collingwood's reasoning in EM, which has since been published as 'Collingwood's Conception of Presuppositional Analysis' . In the present paper I shall draw on that account in offering a critique of Martin's reading