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An Autobiography
Introduction by Stephen Toulmin
Paperback
,
192 pages
Published
December 9th 1982
by Oxford University Press, USA
(first published January 1st 1939)
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Collingwood is a remarkable and independent thinker. His early life was home schooled by his father, a painter and archaeologist, who was closely associated with Ruskin. He was primarily a philosopher, but also did research into history and participated in archeological digs, both of which helped form his philosophical views. He understood very clearly that the questions you ask make all the difference. You can neither understand an ancient philosopher nor an historical event without asking what
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Ostensibly an autobiography, this is actually an account of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood's intellectual life. Seeing him (quickly) through his Kant-browsing childhood, it focuses principally on his 20s and 30s - presumably the period that he felt was most crucial in the development of his thinking. His ideas about meaning (it's all about context and the question that a proposition is answering), history (necessary if one is to think about the context of a philosopher's thought) and 'realism
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This book really should be called An Autobiography of An Historical Mind; it is all about Collingwood's thinking processes throughout his life. Collingwood himself states in his preface: "The autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought." He proposes some very interesting theories for how history and thinking should be approached.
At first I thought that this author really had no business calling this an "autobiography" due to its many elisions, but I understood the structure better once be elucidated his "question-answer" philosophy. Once you can learn to "think" like a historic personage, you can pose and answer the questions that may come to their minds as certain situations unfold.
Collingwood was a maverick philosopher. His autobiography is fascinating as we get a real insight into how this novel thinker developed. If Gerard Durrell's childhood was among animals - Collingwood spent (not exclusively) his among ideas. Of all the mdern philosophers he is the one I return to often.
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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.
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