R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943,) fully Robin George Collingwood, was an English philosopher, historian, and archaeologist. He is celebrated for his historical research on Roman Britain and his original contributions to aesthetics, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of mind.
Born in Coniston, Cumbria, Collingwood was educated at Rugby and Oxford, where he taught philosophy until retirement in 1941. His initial writings, particularly Religion and Philosophy (1916) and Speculum Mentis (1924,) formed extensions of the tradition of philosophical idealism, which he championed compellingly in An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933,) often considered his most important work.
Collingwood was an authority on the archaeology of Roman Britain, and much of his philosophical work was concerned with the reconciliation of history and philosophy. The best known of his archaeological works are The Archaeology of Roman Britain (1930) and Roman Britain and the English Settlements in the Oxford History of England (1936.) Initially a follower of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Benedetto Croce, he progressively saw philosophy as an irreducibly historical discipline, always shaped by its own time and culture.
Collingwood’s other notable books include: The Principles of Art (1937,) Autobiography (1939,) Essay on Metaphysics (1940,) The New Leviathan (1942,) and two posthumous works—The Idea of Nature (1945,) and The Idea of History (1946.)
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A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.
—R. G. Collingwood
Topics: Science
Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is … .
—R. G. Collingwood
Very religious people always shock slightly religious people by their blasphemous attitude to religion; and it was precisely for blasphemy that Jesus was crucified.
—R. G. Collingwood
Topics: Religion
The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
—R. G. Collingwood
Topics: History
There is no truer and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, in the kind one likes best, and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one’s own life. Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.
—R. G. Collingwood
Topics: Work, Freedom
What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.
—R. G. Collingwood
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