ABSTRACT
By way of a conclusion I would like to add a few remarks about the importance of Collingwood’s philosophical project. Collingwood’s work occupies a significant place in the history of philosophy because it provides a systematic attempt to delineate the subject matter and method of philosophical inquiry and to defend the autonomy of philosophical discourse in the face of the decline of traditional metaphysics. Collingwood denies both that the subject matter of philosophy is to be identified with a transcendent realm of real entities and that philosophy is left with no subject matter of its own once it is no longer identified with a study of the supersensible. For Collingwood, immemorial metaphysical problems, such as those concerning the relationship between the mind and the body, freedom and determinism, still persist in spite of the decline of traditional metaphysics. They persist because they are not merely the result of errors into which the metaphysicians of the past have foolishly fallen. Metaphysicians such as Descartes may have been mistaken in hypostatising the concepts of mind and body, but the problem of mind-body dualism does not simply disappear even if the concepts of mind and body are not reified.
