An Essay on Philosophical Method

by R.G. Collingwood, James Connelly (Editor), Giuseppina D'Oro (Editor)

James Connelly and Giuseppina D'Oro present a revised edition of R. G. Collingwood's classic work of 1933, supplementing the original text with important related writings from Collingwood's manuscripts which appear here for the first time. The editors also contribute a substantial new introduction, and the volume will be welcomed by all historians of twentieth-century philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

496 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher and historian. Collingwood was a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, for some 15 years until becoming the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Reviews

[path · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had I written this review immediately after reading this book, I probably would have rated it lower than I have. I would have complained that the book did not appear to be offering a distinct method of philosophical investigation at all. Instead, there was a lot of talk about other methods: scientific, logical, mathematical, critical, etc. But what I realize after a bit of reflection is that the book is an example of what it advocates to be a philosophical method: preceding from the preliminaries that have been established before about method but not supplanting them and proclaiming truth. The book is not, as it seemed, differentiating itself from methodological approaches dedicated to induction, deduction, classification, analysis of form, logic, critique but is showing how philosophical method proceeds from those points without reaching a conclusion as long as new data points are added -- namely through the accumulation of experiences shaped by frameworks of perception but also just by being in the world. The reader is brought along for the ride, and once that becomes clear, the message of the book does as well.

I still don't feel like I know *how* to engage in philosophical inquiry except that it seems to involve finding a reason for denying previous knowledge claims that appear to conflict with new data. But this critique is not negation, which is a refusal to engage, but rather a disassembling and reconstruction that keeps the spirit of the original inquiry, taking apart the knowledge project to the point where conclusions do not conflict with new data and rebuilding to account for what is new.

Knowledge is an accumulation over time, and we all make contributions to it. It is not, even when it seems like it, the destruction of one edifice and the construction of a new one.

[Steve Greenleaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually after finishing a book, or at least one that I’ve found compelling (and assuming I’m not overpowered by busyness or laziness), I write a review of the book. But in this case, I’m not going to. Not because Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933) isn’t compelling; it most certainly is compelling. Rather, I don’t believe I’m up to the task. I often read books far above my paygrade (it’s not that hard for an author to reach that level), but I can usually convince myself that I have something worthwhile to add to the conversation started by the book. But EPM is a philosophy book of a high-order, and the insights that I received from it came by way of lightning flashes rather than guideposts from which I could readily recreate my path through Collingwood’s arguments. I’m not a philosopher, and I had only one course from the philosophy department as an undergraduate and that was a course entitled “Philosophy of History.” It was in that course that I would have been first introduced to Collingwood, and I ignored him. Then, after about 40 years, via the serendipity of an Oxford University Press bookstore near our apartment in Jaipur (India), I came across an inexpensive and tantalizing copy of Collingwood’s most famous book, The Idea of History. Thus, most of my encounter with philosophy (and Collingwood) has come through either the lens of history or politics and law. When it comes to logic, ontology and metaphysics, morality and ethics, and epistemology, I’m a rank amateur. None the less, I sometimes get a great deal of pleasure from jumping into the deep end of the pool, even as I tend to flail around and eventually sink.

For those who may want a review, there are plenty to be found (including a couple on Goodreads). This edition that I read includes an exchange of correspondence between Collingwood and his eventual successor as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle. Gilbert wrote a critical review of EPM in the journal Mind, and Collingwood replied via letter. Reading this exchange between these two reminded me that I’m no philosopher, at least not at that level. (“Cracker-barrel” probably best denotes my rank.) But I did get something out of the exchange: Collingwood gave at least as good as he got in this duel of logic and metaphysics with Ryle. Collingwood is the supposed “idealist” (a designation made by Ryle that Collingwood roundly rejects) and Ryle the “analytic” philosopher, but Collingwood suffers no disadvantage that I could discern in his mastery of logic and analysis. And while I’m not in qualified to score the rounds on logic and analysis, I can say that the exchange reinforces my appreciation of Collingwood as a superb English prose stylist. And, to add spice to his prose, he can prove quite cheeky. Perhaps this is what so riled Ryle.

In fact, the one part of EPM that I believe myself most competent to comprehend and appreciate was the final section, entitled “Philosophy as a Branch of Literature.” In this section, as the title suggests. Collingwood, for all the logic and analysis of the earlier part of the book, makes a compelling case for philosophy as a branch of literature. Please grant me leave to quote at length from Collingwood to allow him to make his point and to help me prove mine about Collingwood as a stylist:

The [philosophical] matter does not exist as a naked but fully formed thought in our minds before we fit it with a garment of words. It is only in some dark and half-conscious way that we know our thoughts before we come to express them. Yet in that obscure fashion they are already within us; and, rising into full consciousness as we find the words to utter them, it is they that determine the words, not vice versa.
. . . .
Prose and poetry are philosophically distinct species of a genus; consequently they overlap. Literary excellence, which is the means to an end in prose and the sole end or essence of poetry, is the same thing in both cases.
. . . .
[M]any of the greatest philosophers, especially those who by common consent sent have written well in addition to thinking well, have used nothing that can be called a technical vocabulary. Berkeley has none; Plato none, if consistency of usage is a test; Descartes none, except when he uses a technical term to point a reference to the thoughts of others; and where a great philosopher like Kant seems to revel in them, it is by no means agreed that his thought gains proportionately in precision and intelligibility, or that the stylist in him is equal to the philosopher.. . . .
It has sometimes been maintained that all language consists of sounds taken at pleasure to serve as marks for certain thoughts or things: which would amount to saying that it consists of technical terms. But since a technical term implies a definition, it is impossible that all words should be technical terms, for if they were we could never understand their definitions. The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it; and a technical term, in so far as it calls for explanation, is to that extent not language but something else which resembles language in being significant, but differs from it in not being expressive or self-explanatory.
. . . .
The duty of the philosopher as a writer is therefore fore to avoid the technical vocabulary proper to science, and to choose his words according to the rules of literature. His terminology must have that expressiveness, that flexibility, that dependence upon context, which are the hall-marks of a literary use of words as opposed to a technical use of symbols.
A corresponding duty rests with the reader of philosophical literature, who must remember that he is reading a language and not a symbolism.
. . . .
Common to all these literary forms is the notion of philosophical writing as essentially a confession, a search by the mind for its own failings and an attempt to remedy them by recognizing them.. . . .
A philosophical work, if it must be called a poem, is not a mere poem, but a poem of the intellect. What is expressed in it is not emotions, desires, feelings, as such, but those which a thinking mind experiences in its search for knowledge; and it expresses these only because the experience of them is an integral part of the search, and that search is thought itself.
. . . .
[P]hilosophy represents the point at which prose comes nearest to being poetry. Owing to the unique intimacy of the relation between the philosophical writer among prose writers and his reader, a relation which elsewhere exists only in fine art or in the wide sense of that word poetry, there is a constant tendency for philosophy as a literary genre to overlap with poetry along their common frontier.
. . . .
[T]he philosopher must go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, and must use it in their way: as a means of exploring one's own mind, and bringing to light what is obscure and doubtful in it. This, as the poets know, implies skill in metaphor and simile, readiness to find new meanings in old words, ability in case of need to invent new words and phrases which shall be understood as soon as they are heard, and briefly a disposition to improvise and create, to treat language as something not fixed and rigid but infinitely flexible and full of life.
. . . .
The prose-writer's writer's art is an art that must conceal itself, and produce not a jewel that is looked at for its own beauty but a crystal in whose depths the thought can be seen without distortion or confusion; and the philosophical writer in especial follows the trade not of a jeweler but of a lens-grinder. He must never use metaphors or imagery in such a way that they attract tract to themselves the attention due to his thought; if he does that he is writing not prose, but, whether well or ill, poetry; but he must avoid this not by rejecting all use of metaphors and imagery, but by using them, poetic things themselves, in the domestication of prose: using them just so far as to reveal thought, and no farther.

R. G. Collingwood. An Essay on Philosophical Method. Kindle Edition.

Please excuse my extended quotation of Collingwood above, but I hope it demonstrates the quality of his prose and that he practices what he preaches. In fact, as I’ve strung together these quotes, I’ve reached the self-realization that my complaint at the beginning of the review--or rather, appreciation--that Collingwood’s work here was too far out of my league to review is a poor excuse for what is, in fact, some laziness on my part. I could follow much of what Collingwood argued and having done so, I know that if I want to—if I put in a modicum of further effort—I can go deeper with him. (I will, however, note that he does tend to drop Latin phrases in his text and to include quotes in the original ancient Greek, French, and German, which can be annoying to someone as pedestrian in languages as I am.)

I was first drawn to Collingwood for his work about history and how we should understand it and pursue it. While doing this, I discovered that he was also a political thinker for dark times (and so I believe connected in spirit with Hannah Arendt, among others), and then discovered that he has compelling ideas about art, feelings and emotions, morality, and consciousness. So, I will continue my journey, and I look forward to returning to EPM.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: Swatting flies with philosophy, or an invitation to hard thinking

In the midst of puzzling my way through the abstract concepts of this book I used it to perform at a very concrete function: kill a fly which had been plaguing our bathroom for several days and successfully delaying its demise in several previous attempts by other means. So it should be said based on this experience that philosophy is both conceptually abstract and functionally concrete and essential to human existence.

And indeed it is. Collingwood's philosophical method, originally published in 1933 at a time when technology seemed ascendant, progress uncertain, politics militant, and philosophy stagnant, sought to find a common ground for philosophy to recover for it a vitality and value for humanity that it seemed to lack. The landscape for humanity, a century later, seems no better, and with technology certainly rampant, progress a vicious roller coaster, and politics dominated by violence, Clinton, and Trump, we need hard thinking now more than ever.

Philosophy, says Collingwood, is the attempt to "come to know better what to some extent we knew already" (p. 205, Chapter 8, Section 2, Paragraph 8) --yes the book is sectioned this way with valuable outline headers in the Contents to lead you through the argument; this hard thinking takes some attention on the reader's part. Collingwood also takes some time to mark off what philosophy is not, and how it differs from the sciences and mathematics with which it is often lumped due to proximity of methods and terminology. He shows how philosophical hypotheses, theories, and categories differ from science and math, and why it matters for philosophy and philosophical methods.

At the risk of over-summarizing the foundation of hard thinking that Collingwood lays out in chapters 2 and 3, philosophical concepts (such as Good and Bad) are not mutually exclusive, all Good or all Bad on absolute opposite ends of a scale, but relative positions on that scale such that

beginning at the bottom of its scale. . . in a reasoned and orderly definition. . . of that concept. . . a philosophical judgement must be an organic whole in which affirmation and negation. . . are all present. [The philosophical method] must consist in a deepening and widening of our knowledge, transforming it into a higher term on the same scale. (p. 222, Chapter 11, Section 1)

Each increment on the scale includes what we knew or thought about the concept at the lower level, "the higher transcending the lower and adding to it something new." (p. 90, Chapter 3, Section 6, Paragraph 33). Thus can we progress, even though our scale in the philosophical method has no absolutes.

As I said this is a very high level summary of a key central argument. Collingwood builds his essay sentence upon sentence and paragraph upon paragraph in a continuous logical argument, so no summary could do it justice. But it is only 225 pages long in the modern paperback reprint edition I read, and it can easily be read through in just a couple of days if you have time and environment to focus and think it through as you read.

The subject matter of philosophy is thought, so Collingwood devotes his final chapter to philosophy as a form of literature. While he refers to the chapter as an "appendix", it is actually a valuable must-read culmination of his method, explaining how philosophers express their arguments on thoughts, how these arguments differ from historical and scientific writing (but are like poetry!), and how readers should read philosophy for comprehension and criticism (both positive and negative). This chapter, coming at the end of the hard thinking, solidified the abstract into the concrete and gave me the takeaway that will make me a better reader and reviewer of all the history, science, and yes, philosophy books I read from now on.

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considered to be the apex of Collingwood's career. Perhaps the clearest book written in philosophy. The prelude to the seminal trilogy that includes The Idea of Nature and The Idea of History.

The chapter titled, "Philosophy as a branch of Literature" is one of my favorites. I have learned much about how to write from reading this book many many times. And of course, I have learned how to think with this book's guidance.

[Muaz Jalil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a Martino edition which basically reprinted the 1933 Oxford edition. It's pretty good. His father was W G Collingwood was a Ruskin scholar and his private secretary. He was almost like step brother to Arthur Ransome, whose autobiography I recently read (includes stuff about Lake District, which is a place I adore).

Collingwood argues that philosophical classifications are not mutually exclusive but have overlaps. His philosophical form of scale which include difference of degree and kind. So pleasure is a kind of good but lower level of good : intellectual pleasure superior to physical pleasure, scale, and wisdom better than pleasure ,kind. Philosophical concepts are not specific but have blurry notion. He argues that in non philosophy, blue and not blue are mutually exclusive and not blue entail red green yellow....etc. But in philosophy, a specific concept entails opposition to nearest opposite, so good implies it against a specific concept of bad. He also mentions that history of philosophy follows philosophical principle, which is an assumption but just like science assuming nature is rational. Philosophy is special because the principles of philosophy is itself a philosophical activity. He defends why philosophical system building is justified, argues that all systems have same problem in that they are not complete but that doesn't stop scientists from building systems. Philosophy builds on previous systems and so we cannot throw away previous systems. Overall very interesting book

[Ady ZYN · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended

[Cheng Wen Cheong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the most overlooked work of the century. This is where Collingwood's writing style achieved a pristine aura beyond the skeptical reach of the post-modernists (not even the prose of Adorno or Baudrillard). There is a gentle yet resolute feeling that emanates from his ideas that reminds me of the words of battle-worn but grateful grandparents. To be able to convey dense ideas with such lucidity is almost a superhuman feat, let alone a proper system of thought that deserves scrutiny time and time again.

The central idea of this book is the scale of forms. It is very clear here that Collingwood was inspired by the Hegelian notion of progress, but exorcised of Absolute Spirit and replaced with human empowerment. The philosopher's job is not to figure out answers for the masses and provide material benefits (that is the scientists'), but uplift the fragile soul of mankind through inspiring ideas and comforting poise (thereby his emphasis on literature). This can be done by thoroughly examining the ideas of the past and attempting to assimilate them into a more integrative system. Philosophy is not science, and neither is it history - it is both and beyond. Philosophy is the culmination of the self-reflexivity of the mind - the ability to challenge its own assumptions, to set aims and sights beyond tangible reach, and most importantly, shed light on the human condition. We should not only try to understand the world around us, but ourselves as a species of being as well.

Collingwood considers this his best, and perhaps, the only book. I would agree that this is his best, and my best pick from the bookstore for a good while.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book on whole is excellent, but the last chapter on philosophy as literature is poetry, exactly as he describes it. Worth buying the book for the last chapter alone.

[Laurence Target · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pleasing physical volume, with lovely paper and type. The prose and thought are good too, a scale of forms.

[Chris Tolve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do we need religious scripture when we have this?

[Mina Talaat]

لن أُقيمه لأنني لم أقدر أن أُكمله حتي النهاية
كتاب لم أفهم منه ما هي غاية الكاتب , فعلي حسب كلامه انه كتاب ان وقت اصداره خلق ازعاج لفلاسفة
و انه غير اي كتاب اخر من حيث قراءته و دراسته للمنهج الفلسفي
ربما سأقرأ له مرة أخري لكن بالانجليزية مع دراسات له و عنه

[Julie]

I do not yet have the words