This paper aims to analyze R. G. Collingwood’s maiden work in philosophy, Religion and Philosophy, in the light of the realism/idealism dispute in early twentieth-century British philosophy. Due to scholars’ narrow scopes of interests, this book has suffered divided and unsettled understandings in literature that find only either realist or idealist character in it. By contrast, I comprehensively examine various aspects of the work on which both readings rest in turn—his conception of history and metaphysics. Consequently, I find out that (...) Collingwood implicitly elaborates a series of negative doctrines attempting to overcome dualismspervading at both poles of the dispute, namely abstract/concrete, subject/object, and theory/action. Since this framework is to be more explicitly present in his subsequent philosophizing, I demonstrate that Religion and Philosophy was, against its underestimated status in literature, not mere juvenilia, but a substantialstarting-point for Collingwood’s philosophy constructively grounded in the contemporary debate. (shrink)

This book, the first full-length treatment of British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood from the perspective of the humanities, analyzes his approach to history and its implications for theological hermeneutics. Contents: I. A Rapprochement Between Philosophy and History; II. The Logic of Question and Answer; III. The Doctrine of Absolute Presuppositions; IV. The Historical Imagination; V. Historical Evidence; VI. The Re-Enactment of Past Thought; VII. Some Theological Applications of Collingwood: Bultmann and Pannenberg. Also includes a Selected Bibliography and Index. (...) Co-published with the College Theology Society. (shrink)