R.G. Collingwood
Discussion
On Civilizational History
From the Brittanica:
"An early book entitled Religion and Philosophy (1916), a critique of empirical psychology and an analysis of religion as a form of knowledge, was followed by a major work, Speculum Mentis (1924), which proposed a philosophy of culture stressing the unity of the mind. Structured around five forms of experience—art, religion, science, history, and philosophy—the work sought a synthesis of levels of knowledge.
During later years, Collingwood enriched his conception of philosophy and history and increasingly proposed a notion of philosophical inquiry that is dependent on the study of history. In two works, Essay on Philosophical Method (1933) and An Essay on Metaphysics (1940), he proposed the historical nature of civilization’s presuppositions and urged that metaphysical study evaluate these presuppositions as historically defined conceptions rather than as eternal verities. His last book, The Idea of History (1946), proposed history as a discipline in which one relives the past in one’s own mind. Only by immersing oneself in the mental actions behind events, by rethinking the past within the context of one’s own experience, can the historian discover the significant patterns and dynamics of cultures and civilizations. Collingwood has been criticized for an overly intellectualist analysis of the motivating forces in history, but his attempt to integrate history and philosophy is recognized as a significant scholarly contribution."