Collingwood's Dialectic of History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4495867 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Louis O Mink (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1968 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3 |
| Publication date | 1968-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2504264 |
| OpenAlex | W2312934290 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
When Collingwood's The Idea of History was published posthumously in 1946, it brought to critical notice an issue which had been almost completely ignored by English-speaking philosophers, although it was increasingly plaguing reflective historians: is history an autonomous mode of knowledge, or is it an imperfectly developed version of the kind of inquiry more securely practiced in the successful natural sciences? Collingwood gave a definite answer to this question, and one which, if not authoritative, was at least reasoned and provocative. Yet the essays collected as Epilegomena in The Idea of History are in fact very difficult to understand and elucidate, although the full extent of their difficulty is concealed by the grace of their style and the often compelling quality of the obiter dicta so often quoted from them. It is notable that advocates as well as critics of Collingwood's views have focused their attention on The Idea of History, perhaps with side glances at his Autobiography of 1939.1 Nevertheless, as I propose to argue, it is virtually impossible to arrive at an adequate interpretation of Collingwood's idea of history from The Idea of History itself. There are at least four main reasons for the almost universal failure to recognize this. First, the seven essays were written at different times for different audiences and were never revised as a whole. This is an especial difficulty where anything like a systematic theory is at issue. While Collingwood did have a systematic
Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Literature · Australian History and Society · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,05 |
| Citation span | 1968 - 2005 (38) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |