Is Collingwood a Historicist? Remarks on Leo Strauss’s Critique of Collingwood’s Philosophy of History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, I examine Strauss’s critique of Collingwood’s interpretive approach and argue that Strauss’s accusation of historicism partly misses its target. While Collingwood can be said to be a “historicist” thinker insofar as he pursues the project of the German historicist tradition and attempts to establish the autonomy and specificity of philosophy of history as a discipline, he does not endorse the premises of radical historicism according to which all thought is historically relative. Although many of Strauss’s arguments against interpretive historicism are valid, they do not apply to Collingwood’s enterprise. In creating a dialogue between the two thinkers, I demonstrate that their respective theories of interpretation are as a matter of fact closer than they appear at first sight. Both philosophers defend the possibility of understanding past authors as they understood themselves, they maintain the importance of the quest for philosophical truth in interpreting the past texts and make the case for the necessity of history for philosophy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".