Background
Collingwood was born on February 22, 1889 in Cartmel Fell, Lancashire.
archaeologist historian philosopher
Collingwood was born on February 22, 1889 in Cartmel Fell, Lancashire.
He was educated at Rugby School, and at University College, Oxford, where he gained a First in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin) in 1910 and a congratulatory First in Greats (Ancient History and Philosophy) in 1912. Prior to graduation he was elected a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
He is often described as one of the British Idealists, although the label fails to capture his distinctive kind of idealism, which is conceptual rather than metaphysical. In his correspondence with Gilbert Ryle, Collingwood himself explicitly rejected the label “idealist” because he did not endorse the arch-rationalist assumptions that shaped much British idealism at the end of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century and consequently did not wish to be identified with it.
Primarily through the interpretative efforts of W. H. Dray, Collingwood's work in the philosophy of history came to be seen as providing a powerful antidote against Carl Hempel's claim for methodological unity.
Collingwood is the author of one of the most important treatises in meta-philosophy written in the first half of the twentieth century, An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), which is a sustained attempt to explain why philosophy is an autonomous discipline with a distinctive method and subject matter that differ from those of the natural and the exact sciences.
From the mid-thirties onwards Collingwood's work increasingly engaged in a dialogue with the newly emerging school of analytic philosophy. In An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) he attacked the neo-empiricist assumptions prevalent in early analytic philosophy and advocated a logical/epistemological transformation of metaphysics from a study of being or ontology to a study of the absolute presuppositions or heuristic principles which govern different forms of inquiry. Collingwood thus occupies a distinctive position in the history of British philosophy in the first half of the 20th century.
He was a practicing Anglican throughout his life.
In politics Collingwood defended the ideals of what he called liberalism "in its Continental sense."
He rejects equally the neo-empiricist assumptions that prevailed in early analytic philosophy and the kind of metaphysics that the analytical school sought to overthrow. His epistemological reform of metaphysics also ensures a distinctive role and subject matter for philosophical inquiry and is thus far from advocating a merely therapeutic conception of philosophy or the dissolution of philosophical into the linguistic analysis in the manner of ordinary language philosophy.
Robin George Collingwood was married to Ethel Winifred Graham in 1918, they divorced in 1942, then he married Kathleen Francis Edwards in 1942. From the first marriage he had two children and one daughter from the second.