Robin George Collingwood (1889 -1943) was a leading English philosopher and archaeologist. As The Waynefleet Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford from 1936 to 1941 he found it necessary to defend himself against the claims of the Logical Positivists and A J Ayer to the effect that there could be no valid Metaphysics. This he did in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940).
He is usually regarded as a British Idealist, though that was a term he did not apply to himself. As an Idealist at Oxford at a time when most other philosophers there were turning to Analytical or Realist Philosophy, and also because he blamed such philosophies for the build-up of a Fascist ethos at Oxford in the 1930s, he found himself somewhat isolated at the University. His Idealism derived from, and developed alongside, that of Italian Idealists rather than that of Hegel, but like Hegel’s it took seriously the importance of History for Philosophy. He claimed that ‘All history is the history of thought’, also ‘ … all reality is history and all knowledge is historical knowledge’.
He arguably came close to, without fully endorsing, Benedetto Croce’s position that ‘philosophy is only a constituent element within history …’ – an approach to philosophy known as ‘Historism’. We will see how he developed his history-centred philosophy through key concepts: the logic of ‘Question and Answer’, the doctrine of ‘Re-enactment’ of earlier thought, and the doctrine of ‘Absolute Presuppositions’ in human thought. These ideas were passed on to us through a number of his writings, particularly ‘The Idea of History’, published