The Foundations of History by Stephen Leach

Author:Stephen Leach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collingwood, philosophy of history, metaphilosophy, Oxford realism, logical posivitism, scale of forms, metaphysics, ontological argument, intuition, Ryle, critical history, scientific history, reenactment, Popper, Gardiner, simulation theory, causation, radical conversion hypothesis, historical methodology, scepticism
ISBN: 9781845408725
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2017
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

For Collingwood, ‘[w]ords are historical and social facts’. [47] This suggests that certain fundamental questions asked of written evidence will be the same as that concerning unwritten evidence - for example, questions concerning the provenance of the historian’s evidence.

He dismisses the idea that archaeology is the ‘handmaid of history’, [48] useful only in cases where there is no written evidence, and suggests instead that archaeology should be seen as ‘the methodology of history’. [49]

(iv) Human Chauvinism [50]

As is perhaps clearer in The Principles of History than in The Idea of History, Collingwood does not simply define human beings as rational and on that ground conclude that the subject matter of history is human beings. As he indicates in the following passage, his argument is not that the subject matter of history is human beings but that it is rational thought.

Res Gestae are not the actions, in the widest sense of that word, which are done by animals of the species called human; they are actions in another sense of the same word, equally familiar but narrower, actions done by reasonable agents in pursuit of ends determined by their reason.

These include - is it necessary to add? - acts done by an unreasonable agent in pursuit of ends (or in the adoption of means) determined by his unreason; for what is meant by unreason, in a context of this kind, is not the absence of reasons but the presence of bad ones; and a bad reason is still a reason. [51]

According to Collingwood, it is simply a contingent fact that humans have displayed the most evidence of reasonable chains of thought. The issue of ‘species chauvinism’ has risen in prominence since Collingwood’s death, with the realization that in the past our species lived alongside neanderthals and homo floresiensis: both of which displayed characteristics previously thought to be the exclusive preserve of homo sapiens. He appears to anticipate and deflect the charge of ‘species chauvinism’ by arguing that it is impossible to draw a rigid dividing line between rational and non-rational animals.

As an example of what I mean, the American writer Ernest Thompson Seton, some years ago, published a series of books in which he professed to reconstruct, from such evidence as that of their tracks, the processes of reason which had determined the actions of various wild animals. If genuine, these were real history of Res Gestae. But many readers must have doubted whether they were not sentimentalized portraits falsified by a desire to find in the wild animals he loved a resemblance to human beings closer than actually exists. However that may be, this is clear, that the question whether history of non-human deeds is possible is to be answered not by arguing, but by trying to write it. [52]

Untouched by human chauvinism, the archaeologist Robert Heizer classes the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations as a form of archaeology. [53] There is nothing in Collingwood’s philosophy that would rule out this classification.

(v) Irrationality

The criticism that Collingwood’s absolute presupposition

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