Abstract:
Collingwood was a fellow of Pembroke, Oxford for some 15 years until becoming the Waynflete
Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was the only pupil of F. J.
Haverfield to survive World War I. Important influences on Collingwood were the Italian Idealists
Croce, Gentile and Guido de Ruggiero, the last of whom was also a close friend. Other important
influences were Hegel, Kant, Vico, F. H. Bradley and J. A. Smith. His father W. G. Collingwood,
professor of fine arts at Reading University, was a student of Ruskin and was also an important
influence. Collingwood is most famous for his book The Idea of History (1965), a work collated from
various sources soon after his death by his pupil, T. M. Knox. The book came to be a major
inspiration for philosophy of history in the English-speaking world. It is extensively cited, leading one
commentator to ironically remark that Collingwood is coming to be "the best known neglected thinker
of our time". Not just a philosopher of history, Collingwood was also a practicing historian and
archaeologist, being during his time a leading authority on Roman Britain. Collingwood held history
as "recollection" of the "thinking" of a historical personage. Collingwood considered whether two
different people can have the same thought and not just the same content, concluding that "there is no
tenable theory of personal identity" preventing such a doctrine. In The Principles of Art (1938)
Collingwood held (following Croce) that works of art are essentially expressions of emotion. He
portrayed art as a necessary function of the human mind, and considered it collaborative activity.
After several years of increasingly debilitating strokes Collingwood died at Coniston, Lancashire in
January 1943. He was a practicing Anglican throughout his life