R. G. Collingwood Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael A. Kissell

Critical Essay by Michael A. Kissell

SOURCE: "Progressive Traditionalism as the Spirit of Collingwood's Philosophy," in History and Theory, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, 1990, pp. 51-6.

In the following essay, Kissell characterizes Collingwood's thought as "progressive traditionalism" in the sense that it addresses both the changing phenomena of history and perennial issues of philosophy.

Thirty-two years ago when I began my dissertation on Collingwood's philosophy, the people around me said: "Who was he? Where did you dig him up and why, since nobody knows him?" As a young graduate student, I was philosophically very naive and educated in the spirit of dogmatically distorted Marxism, but I saw at once that in Collingwood's books there was an extraordinary clarity of thought, brilliant mastery of the English language, and carefully elaborated argumentation appealing to a human capacity for self-reflection rather than deduction from dogmatically asserted premises. These qualities I recognized before I could penetrate the philosophical meaning of...
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