Abstract

In 1938, four years before his death, Collingwood characterized his life as “in the main an attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and history”. Collingwood's success in this matter has been a subject of much debate. The majority of his critics have argued, following the leadership of T. A. Knox, that the alleged rapprochement was a failure. In the early writings, such as Religion and Philosophy and Speculum Mentis, it is simply obscure. In An Essay on Philosophical Method it emerges more clearly but with a definite bias in favour of philosophy. Sometime between 1936 and 1938, however, Collingwood underwent a radical conversion to the historicist doctrine, typical of the thought of Croce, that philosophy is a branch of history. The result, according to the Knox thesis, was an explicit repudiation, in the Autobiography and An Essay on Metaphysics, of Collingwood's earlier belief in the priority and autonomy of philosophy.