The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood

Johnston, William M.

ISBN 10: 9401186782 / ISBN 13: 9789401186780

Published by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1967

About this Item

1967. xiii, 167pp. "R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was one of the few universal minds of our century. While he is best known for books of his later years as The Principles of Art (1938) and The Idea of ??History (1946), this study aims to draw attention to the no less brilliant articles and books of his early years (to 1924). It is argued that these works reveal a profound, almost unsuspected influence of John Ruskin, whose passion for the many-sided life Collingwood translated into a philosophy of culture based on the Italian idealists Croce and Gentile." Softcover in very good condition with no inscriptions.

Seller Inventory # PhilCollingwood03

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood
• Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague
• Publication Date: 1967
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9401186782
• ISBN 13: 9789401186780
• Binding: Softcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy & Related

About this title

Synopsis

Collingwood and Hegel R. G. Collingwood was a lonely thinker. Begrudgingly admired by some and bludgeoned by others, he failed to train a single disciple, just as he failed to communicate to the reading public his vision of the unity of experience. This failure stands in stark contrast to the success of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who won many disciples to a very similar point-of-view and whose influence on subsequent thought, having been rediscovered since 1920, has not yet been adequately explored. Collingwood and Hegel share three fundamental similarities: both men held overwhelming admiration of the Greeks, both possessed uniquely broad knowledge of academic controversies of their day, and both were inalterably convinced that human experience consti­ tutes a single whole. If experts find Collingwood's vision of wholeness less satisfactory than Hegel's, much of the fault lies in the atmosphere in which Col­ lingwood labored. Oxford in the 1920'S and 1930's, sceptical and specialized, was not the enthusiastic Heidelberg and Berlin of 1816 to 183I. What is important in Collingwood is not that he fell short of Hegel but that working under adverse conditions he came so elose. Indeed those unfamiliar with Hegel will find in Collingwood's early works, especially in Speculum M entis, a useful introduction to the great German.