The Myth of Collingwood's Historicism

Abstract

This paper seeks to clarify the precise sense in which Collingwood's “metaphysics without ontology” is a descriptive metaphysics. It locates Collingwood's metaphysics against the background of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics and then defends it against the claim that Collingwood reduced metaphysics to a form of cultural anthropology. Collingwood's metaphysics is descriptive not because it is some sort of historicised psychology that describes temporally parochial and historically shifting assumptions, but because it is a high level form of conceptual analysis premised on the claim that ontological questions are actually internal ones and that metaphysics, understood as an attempt to answer external questions, is not a possible philosophical enterprise. This non-historicist reading of what it means to take the ontology out of metaphysics has broader implications which go beyond a scholarly debate in so far as it shows that it is possible to maintain objectivity in the absence of strong ontological underpinnings.