Philosophy of history is not a subject which has hitherto attracted much attention in this country. Preoccupation with the methods and achievements of the natural sciences, and distaste for the sort of rationale of history as a whole which Hegel and others offered under the title in the early nineteenth century, have served to make most British philosophers accord its problems only the most casual recognition. It is therefore all the more interesting to find an English writer of unusual powers (...) both of argument and expression, who was himself an historian of distinction in his special field, devoting a large part of his philosophical thinking to the problems of historical knowledge and their wider implications. Unfortunately, R. G. Collingwood was not able to begin the major work on philosophy of history, to writing which, as we are told in the introduction to the present book, he had looked forward for twenty-five years, until his powers were seriously affected by bad health, and he did not live to complete it. But though the full results of his thinking on the subject are lost, we are now able, thanks to the skilful work of his friend Professor T. M. Knox, to study what is in effect an extensive interim report on it. Professor Knox has produced The Idea of History largely on the basis of lectures which Collingwood prepared in 1936, supplemented by two essays already published which date from the same period and a certain amount of material from the unfinished Principles of History written in 1939. (shrink)

This essay amounts to a commentary on some of the leading doctrines of the Analogies of Experience, whose main contention I take to be that we should not be in possession of a unitary time-system unless certain things were true, and indeed necessarily true, of the world of experienced fact. A unitary time-system is one in which all temporal ascriptions—all dates and durations—are directly relateable; it makes sense inside such a system to ask of every supposed happening whether it preceded, (...) followed or was simultaneous with anything else which is taken to happen. Kant assumes, obviously correctly as it seems to me, that the temporal system we have at least purports to be unitary in this way. He also assumes, again as I see it uncontrovertibly, that statements assigning dates to events or durations to processes are intended to say something about the objective world, instead of to record what particular persons happen to feel. We do contrast real with apparent duration, but it is the former which necessarily occupies our primary attention, for only if we first fix the real position of some things in the temporal process can we speak effectively of the apparent position of other things. The real, here as elsewhere, is the normal, the apparent the deviant, and you cannot understand the deviant until you grasp that from which it deviates. Our chief aim in operating a system of temporal concepts must accordingly be to say what objectively is the case. (shrink)

What is the Critique of Pure Reason about? The terminology of the work is so perplexing, its argument so obscurely expressed, that the ordinary reader may be forgiven if he puts it down at the end very much in the dark as to what it all means. He will have seen that in it Kant has attempted to establish certain conclusions: the subjectivity of space and time, the existence and objective validity of a number of a priori concepts or categories, (...) the falsity of the arguments used to defend the metaphysical system most widely favoured in German learned circles in the eighteenth century; but though he has grasped all this he may yet have failed to make sense of the work as a whole. It is the old story of not seeing the wood for trees; and in this case the fault is more excusable than in most, for the individual trees each demand so much attention and are so difficult to get round that it is all too easy to forget the very existence of the wood. At the worst, one may think that there is no wood at all; only a miscellaneous aggregate of individual trees which have nothing to do with each other. (shrink)

The sequence from ideal state to tyran I ny contained in Books VIII-IX of the Republic constitutes neither history nor philosophy of history, but rather completes Plato's overall theory of politics, dealing, like every theoretical science, with simplified or pure cases, and narrated purely for dramatic effort. Popper's view that Plato was fundamentally an historicist is incorrect. Plato makes no straightforward comments on philosophy of history. Perhaps, like many Greeks, he surveyed history pessimistically, but he did not propound an iron (...) law of decay. As a social scientist Plato held that there are laws of political change without supposing the course of history is unalterably fixed. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to discuss a problem which, though it has not in the recent past attracted the attention of many philosophers, nevertheless, in my opinion, belongs quite clearly to that branch of the subject which should rightly be called “philosophy of history”: the problem, namely, of history's intelligibility. Two main questions can be asked about this which it is important that philosophers should answer. The first is that of whether history is intelligible in the sense that we (...) can find intelligible connections bètween all or any of its parts. The significance of this question is apparent enough; for has not one of the philosopher's most pressing problems since Hume's time been that of whether any such connections are traceable in the world of fact? It is true that almost every theory on this subject has been put forward after a consideration of the sphere of physical nature only; but because this procedure has been universally followed, it is not therefore to be accepted as right. For history too offers us facts, and it is at least possible that these differ in important ways from those to be met with in nature, with the result that we can discover other sorts of connection between them than those which the physical sciences recognize. The possibility would seem to be worth investigation, and it is with it that I shall be concerned in the first part of my paper. In the other half I deal with the second main question about historical intelligibility. Supposing that we can find some cases of historical events being intrinsically, i.e. intelligibly related, we can go on to ask whether history is intelligible in a more ultimate sense. Is history, we can now inquire, a thing which is essentially rational, or is the rationality we can find in it of a merely superficial character? To put the problem somewhat more fully, is the historian able to do more than see intrinsic connections between the events which he investigates: can he go further and understand the course of history as a whole, so that he is able to say, in the popular phrases, that history “makes sense,” is “meaningful” and “has rhyme and reason” in it? It seems to me that this is a matter which certainly ought to be discussed by philosophers, if only for the assertion of history's rationality which some philosophers have made. (shrink)

Goldstein attempts to establish a middle position between the idealist and the realist arguments concerning truth and fact in history. Though fact serves as the touchstone of truth, we cannot verify propositions, especially historical propositions, in terms of fact. Nowell-Smith argues that Goldstein cannot acknowledge the importance of reality for everyday affairs, while denying its importance in history. Goldstein could have avoided such problems by realizing that if he is an opponent of historical realism, he must be a supporter of (...) historical idealism. He could resolve Nowell-Smith's objections by adopting the Kantian argument which contrasts two types of judgment; judgment proper and particular attempts at judgment. Statements of objective fact, including historical facts, would be considered judgment proper. This would still allow for some judgments which did not fulfill objective criteria, but could count as knowledge. (shrink)