Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Collingwood über Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: philosophy of history (Philosophiegeschichte): the methodological component present in the consciousness that a scientific historian has of his own performance

Textausschnitt: 5/13 So much for familiarity. Besides that, there is authority, and I quote Collingwood's The Idea of History:
Philosophy cannot interfere with history according to the Hegelian formula of superimposing a philosophical history on the top of ordinary history. [...] Ordinary history is already philosophical history [...] within the concrete whole which is historical knowledge, philosophical knowledge is a component part. [...]
[...] (history is necessary) relatively to philosophy as the concrete thought of which philosophy is only the methodological moment. [...]
[...] (history is) the consciousness of one's own activity as one actually performs it. ... For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that [...] the evidence for them should be here and now before him and intelligible to him. For history [...] lives only, as a present interest and pursuit, in the mind of the historian when he criticizes and interprets [...] documents, and by so doing relives for himself the states of mind into which he inquires.