Collingwood: Homage to Education

• Published in: Minds and Bodies
• Main Author: Mcginn, Colin
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY Oxford University Press 28.08.1997
• Subjects: 20th-Century Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; clarity; Bertrand; surprising; apparent; influence
• ISBN: 0195113551; 9780195113556
• DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195113556.003.0039

Robin Collingwood (1889-1943) was born seventeen years after Bertrand Russell and died twenty-seven years before him. Given the style and content of Collingwood’s philosophical work, this fact ought to seem surprising. For there is no apparent mark of Russell’s influence, hor of those who influenced him, upon Collingwood’s own philosophical corpus. For better or worse, he stands apart-even aloof-from the British analytical tradition exemplified by Russell. Or perhaps for better and worse: better, because he thereby created a distinctive style of philosophy, in which history, not science (or formal logic), was the model and focus of interest; worse, because his own thought lacks some of the clarity and rigor and analytical depth of the “school” he opposed, or ignored. Not for him the dry deductions of Russell’s Principia Mathematica: consciousness in history was what excited his interest. Yet there exists a certain affinity between the political and social writings of the two men. Both seem to have been drawn to political writing more by extramural convulsions (i.e., wars) than by theoretical inclination, feeling it to be their duty to set the world straight on how it should run itself. Both display the same belief in the civilizing role of dispassionate reason, the importance of education, the dangers of submission to authority.