ABSTRACT
The task of philosophy, for Collingwood, is not to enlarge or expand knowledge but to engender reflection on the fundamental principles or presuppositions on which knowledge rests. Philosophy, Collingwood claims, ‘does not, like exact or empirical science, bring us to know things of which we were simply ignorant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we already knew in some way’ (An Essay on Philosophical Method (EPM), 161). Philosophy for Collingwood is a reflective activity whose task is to bring to light or render explicit what was already implicitly known. The subject matter of philosophy is the key principles underpinning certain areas of knowledge or experience such as art, natural science and history, principles which are implicitly known to the practitioners of those disciplines, to the practising artist, scientist and historian. The subject matter of philosophy, therefore, is second order: the philosopher is not concerned with particular works of art, scientific hypotheses or historical arguments but with the nature of the activity in which artists, scientists and historians are engaged. The practitioners of particular disciplines are not required to conceptualise or thematise the nature of their activities; if they do so, if scientists become, for instance, interested in second-order questions concerning the principles which underpin the scientific investigation of nature, they take on the role of philosophers. Any activity, therefore, be this art, science or history, is governed by certain fundamental principles, principles that delineate the nature of that activity, that need not be explicitly known to the practitioner and which constitute the subject matter of philosophy. How are these principles known, how are they brought to light or rendered explicit? In EPM1
Collingwood says that the method of philosophy is neither deductive nor inductive (EPM, 151). It is not deductive because philosophers need to provide some justification for the principles they claim lie at the basis of particular areas of knowledge. Such principles need to be argued for; the philosopher, consequently, cannot argue from those principles deductively or treat these principles as mathematical or geometrical axioms from which conclusions are drawn through step-by-step deductive inferences. The method by which the philosopher brings these principles to
light or makes them explicit is not inductive either. This is because the principles argued for by the philosopher need to be already implicitly possessed by the practitioners of those disciplines in order for that form of experience or knowledge to be possible. Given that such principles make a particular form of experience or knowledge possible, they cannot be derived empirically or known inductively. The philosopher must consequently begin from certain disciplines, from their practice and regressively ascend to the conditions of their possibility. In this way philosophy uncovers principles that are a priori, not in the sense that they are necessarily true, or cannot be denied without contradiction, but in the sense that they underpin, structure and make possible a particular area of knowledge or experience. The method that philosophy employs is therefore not a priori in the sense that the philosopher establishes certain principles either intuitively or deductively. It is a priori in the much weaker sense that philosophy uncovers or brings to light certain principles by reflecting on the nature of experience. In the way in which a linguist reasons to the grammatical rules of language from the practice of native speakers, the philosopher too reasons from certain forms of knowledge to the principles that govern it. The principles that the philosopher advances as capturing the deep structure of a particular area of experience are justified to the extent that they succeed in explaining the nature of the activity singled out for attention, not to the extent that they are intuitively or deductively true.
