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Manuscrittheseentier-Versiondéfinitive-20-02-2026.pdf
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Authors
Supervisors
Schmutz, Jacob
Abstract
Our research has two objectives, which we have pursued in tandem and which form the two main parts of our thesis. Firstly, there is a need to produce a work of the history of philosophy that better situates the thought of the philosopher, archaeologist and historian R.G. Collingwood within the development of British philosophy during the first half of the 20th century. British historiography, largely written by philosophers associated with the analytic movement, has largely disregarded all philosophical and metaphysical endeavours linked to Hegelian idealism and thus regarded as ‘out of step with their time’. The first part of our thesis aims to demonstrate Collingwood’s integration into the philosophy of his time: his years of study under Cook-Wilson, the influence of intellectual circles in the philosophy of religion, the connections with Italian neo-idealism and the thought of John Ruskin, right up to his appointment to the chair of Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, where he expounded his philosophy of history. This historical overview, informed by archival research, therefore aims to provide a better understanding of the philosophical issues at stake in the debate between idealism and realism, in order to grasp the originality of Collingwood’s thought. We then decided to examine this originality through the concept of survival, which has been largely overlooked in Collingwoodian studies. To this end, we first reconstructed his epistemology by drawing on a corpus of polemical texts in which Collingwood opposes both idealism and realism in order to define what he calls ‘objective idealism’. However, it is only through this theory of mediated, non-intuitive and objective knowledge that Collingwood can introduce his philosophy of history. It is therefore within the framework of Collingwoodian epistemology that we have studied the concepts of re-enactment, encapsulation and survival. This survival—which is an understanding of the temporality of philosophical concepts—provides Collingwood with the conceptual background necessary to establish a new philosophical method which he contrasts with what he is one of the first to call ‘analytic philosophy’. Our final chapter therefore examines several examples of the survival of concepts, elucidated by this historical-philosophical method. Finally, we emphasise that this method appears to have initiated a tradition, or at least bears a resemblance to the methods of philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre.
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de Guillebon, B. (2026). R.G. Collingwood à Oxford (1908-1943), une philosophie de la survivance.